The Ministry of Civil Aviation has announced that the Digi Yatra facility, the mobile application-based facility conceived to achieve contactless, seamless processing of passengers at airports based on Facial Recognition Technology (FRT), will be launched at six more airports in August.
Passengers using this facility can pass through various airports checkpoints using paperless, contactless processing using facial features to validate their identity and travel details. This will increase the number of Digi Yatra-enabled airports in India to thirteen, and as of August 10, 3.46 million passengers have used this facility.
Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia formally launched Digi Yatra in December 2022. It was originally implemented at three airports - New Delhi, Varanasi, and Bengaluru, and has since been implemented at four more airports, Vijayawada, Pune, Hyderabad, and Kolkata. As of August 10, 2023, the application user base is 1.29 million.
To allay fears related to sharing of private data of travellers, there is no central storage of passengers' Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data in the Digi Yatra process, and all passengers' data is encrypted and stored in their smartphone's wallet. The data is shared only between the passenger and the airport of travel origin, where the passenger's Digi Yatra ID needs to be validated. The data is purged from the airport's system within 24 hours of flight departure.
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