Gaya International Airport will keep ‘GAY’ code, despite conservative push to change it
Gaya International Airport remains “gay”.
Gaya airport in India will retain its three -letters code despite numerous requests from the modification, including a conservative legislator and Air India.
Bhim Singh, member of the Upper Chamber of the Indian Parliament, Rajya Sabha, recently submitted a written investigation using the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to modify the code, saying that it makes people “uncomfortable”. Singh said in his investigation, obtained by Hindustan Timesthat the abbreviation is “socially and culturally offensive” and that it should be changed into “a more respectful and culturally appropriate code”.
Article 377 of the Indian Criminal Code, initially adopted under colonial domination by the British RAJ, criminalized homosexual sexual relations as “carnal relations against the order of nature”. It was indeed for 70 years after India obtained its independence from the United Kingdom, before being canceled in 2018 by the country’s Supreme Court.
Although homosexual relations are no longer criminalized in India, LGBTQ + people still have trouble finding acceptance socially and legally. The court rejected petitions for equality of marriage in 2023, and only 53% of adults declared in a survey of the Pew Research Center the same year that the same sex couples should be able to marry legally, against 43% against him.
The Minister of Civil Aviation, Shri Murlidhar Mohol, has since published a written response to Singh, recognizing that even if the requests for modification of the Gaya code have been received in the past by the Ministry of Civil Aviation and the Airport Authority of India “, organizations have no intention of changing it.
Mohol explained that three -letters airport codes, also known as the IATA location identifiers, are allocated by IATA to “facilitate the identification of airports through various systems and processes related to travel” and that they are “generally affected using the first three letters of the name of the location where the airport is located”.
Because the codes are “mainly intended for the operations of commercial airlines and are issued at the request of airline operators”, airlines can request to modify them. Mohol said that Air India had already asked the IATA to change the airport code, but that there is no reason good enough to change it.
“The codes of three letters attributed are considered permanent and are only changed in exceptional circumstances, generally involving air security problems,” he concluded.
This article originally appeared on Advocate: Gaya International Airport will keep the code “ Gay ”, despite a conservative push to change it
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