Flights sold out; no taxis, buses for Delhi

Jaswinder Singh Baidwan

Akhran da mureed
Staff member
Despite skyrocketing air fare, all routine and additional flights from the Chandigarh international airport to Delhi are booked for tomorrow and the day after. The only availability is with GoAir for Wednesday as the airline has pressed additional flights into service on this route for the next two days.
Besides the nine routine flights from Chandigarh to Delhi, six additional flights took off from the city today. The same number of flights is scheduled to take off from the city on Tuesday. However, no seats are available now. While Indigo, Jet Airways, GoAir and Air India have pressed one additional flight each, SpiceJet has started two additional flights.
A GoAir official said, “All tickets are booked. However, for Wednesday, we have some seats available for around Rs 21,000 per seat.”
There was no let-up in the price of air tickets even today as these sold between Rs 17,000 and Rs 27,000. The airport saw a huge rush of people today.
Interestingly, one can travel to Dubai and Singapore from Delhi for Rs 9,000 and 14,000, respectively.
Bus passengers at the receiving end
The ISBT, Sector 17, continues to disappoint people who have been waiting to go to Delhi for the past few days as the Haryana Roadways bus service remained suspended on Monday as well. Officials at the enquiry counter said there were no buses for Delhi and Haryana today and there was little hope for the buses to ply tomorrow. They said they were waiting for the situation to normalise in the trouble-torn state.
The buses of other roadways, which go to Delhi from the ISBT, Sector 43, also did not ply. The roadways restricted the movement of their buses to other states and did not ply to Delhi and troubled parts of Haryana. “I have been waiting for the bus service to resume for the past two days. Now, I am leaving for Sector 43 from where I will take a bus to Dehradun and leave for Delhi from there through the other route,” said Yogesh Kumar, a resident of Sector 27. Taxi operators, too, refused to ply to Delhi and Haryana.
Air passengers pay through the nose
We are nine members of a family who have to go to Canada and have been trying to take a flight to Delhi for the past three days. Finally, we have got an Indigo flight to Delhi, but it has cost us Rs 18,000 per person. Normally, the fare is around Rs 3,000 to Rs 4,000, but the airlines are cashing in on the Jats’ agitation. — Parminder Singh, Mohali Resident
We have a flight at 11.15 am on Tuesday, which has cost us Rs 15,000 per seat. This is not all. We have been asked to shell out Rs 10,000 for the baggage. The airlines are cheating passengers. Some tickets are reportedly being sold for Rs 50,000 online. — Rajmeet Singh Randhawa, Chandigarh Resident
 
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