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Digi Yatra may be rolled out at 7 airports from Aug 31
Digi Yatra facility will allow passengers to link their travel and identity documents together and create a facial scan beforehand, which will do away with the need for them to show their boarding passes or identity cards when they arrive at an airport, drop their bags, or proceed for boarding
Passengers departing through seven airports, including the national capital’s, will be able to authenticate themselves through facial recognition cameras from August 31, when the first phase of the government’s ambitious Digi Yatra system rolls out, people aware of the matter have said.
The Digi Yatra facility will allow passengers to link their travel and identity documents together and create a facial scan beforehand, which will do away with the need for them to show their boarding passes or identity cards when they arrive at an airport, drop their bags, or proceed for boarding. Instead, they will need to show their face to a facial recognition camera to authenticate themselves.
The measure will help drastically cut down queues and waiting times at security check and boarding gates, a civil aviation ministry official said, asking not to be named. The plan has been in the work since 2018.
The airports that will be part of the August 31 roll-out are Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Varanasi, Vijayawada, Kolkata and Pune.
Initially, air travellers will need to use Aadhaar to register on the system. An official said the Digi Yatra Foundation, a non-profit with multiple private airports and the Airports Authority of India (AAI) as its stakeholder, is rolling out a Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem that will work with the various systems involved – government ID repositories, the airports’ security systems, and airlines’ back-end networks.
An AAI spokesperson said the system is being designed to what is known as the W3C standards on decentralised identity (DID). “This enables for advance sharing of the various verifiable credentials required for travel through various airport checkpoints,” said this person.
A mobile application, which will be available for Apple iPhones as well as those using Android devices, “is ready to be rolled out for this purpose and the back-end ecosystem with the issuers and verifiers is also tested and ready,” an official from the Bengaluru airport added.
“With the Digi Yatra Central Platform, we believe the adoption of this new technology will surge across all airports in India,” the AAI official added.
But privacy experts sounded caution over the system. “The government is assuming that face recognition technology is accurate, and it works all the time, which is not true. Testing the technology in lab and, in reality, it involves multiple things in place, is different,” said Anushka Jain, associate policy council, Internet Freedom Foundation.
“If one submits his/ her Aadhar card as an ID proof, which has an old photo, there are high chances that the photo might not match the person’s current facial features. In this manner, the technology can become a hassle. Secondly, India does not have data protection law and so we do not know who the airport shares the data with (police, private technology companies etc). We do not know about how the data collection exercise will take place,” added Jain.
How will it work?
In the first step, people will need to download and install the Digi Yatra mobile application that is due to be launched.
Once they sign up, they will have to first feed in their identity documents -- for now, Aadhaar -- using the government’s Digi Locker document repository service.
After they have validated their identity, they will be asked to take a selfie that will record their facial features. After this process is complete, a Digi Yatra ID will be generated and passengers can then associate their flight bookings on the app.
“The Digi Yatra app will share the duly encrypted passenger’s face and booking information to the airport on the day of travel,” a GMR spokesperson said. GMR handles the airports at Hyderabad and Delhi.
“The passenger’s face will act as his ID proof and travel document and will be validated by the system without any physical document checks. The airports will be equipped with biometric camera-based E-Gate at pre-security area and boarding. Passenger’s face acts as his ID proof and travel document to allow him to enter the security area and allow him/ her to board his flight,” the GMR spokesperson added.
In the initial weeks, special kiosks will be setup at airports to help people register to the service.
