NewsGate Press Network

By Vineet Dikshit

The government initiative is known by the name of Digi Yatra wherein passengers travelling by air will be able to walk-into the airport, board an aircraft by scan of their face.

No boarding card or no paper trail – just the face recognition.

The Digi Yatra policy is an initiative launched by Ministry of Civil Aviation for biometric boarding system using Facial Recognition Technology.

It aims at providing seamless and hassle-free experience for passengers at airports.

On Thursday the 2nd of February 2023 ministry of civil aviation give a detail statement on the floor of the Lok Sabha in form of an answer to a written question  –

Digi Yatra is to be implemented across airports in a phased manner. In first phase, Digi Yatra has been launched on 01.12.2022 at Delhi, Bangalore and Varanasi Airports for providing passengers contactless, paperless check-in and boarding process based on facial biometrics.

The implementation of Digi Yatra under phase I is also planned at Kolkata, Pune, Vijayawada and Hyderabad Airports by March 2023 and across various airports in the country in phased manner.

Digital transformation of aviation sector is an ongoing endeavour. As per requirement, the digitisation of various processes in aviation sector is undertaken.

M/s Dataevolve Solutions has built FRT based Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem. It has been selected through a national start-up challenge run by NitiAayog under the Atal Innovation Mission.

Digi Yatra is a voluntary facility for providing passengers seamless and hassle-free experience at the Airports. In the Digi Yatra process, there is no central storage of passenger’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data. All the passenger’s data is encrypted and stored in the wallet of the passenger’s smartphone and shared only for a limited time duration with the airport of travel origin where passenger’s Digi Yatra ID needs to be validated.

The data is purged from the system within 24 hours of flight. Facilities with implementation of the Digi Yatra provides Touchless Passenger Validation through FRT which results in saving time at various touchpoints like entry to airport, Security Hold Area (SHA) and Boarding Area with no CISF intervention.