‘Onwards and upwards’: Scindia praises DigiYatra for 20,000 users in 40 days

Civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia launched the first phase of the DigiYatra facility last month from the Delhi airport. The facility is available at Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai as of now.

After the first ‘normal’ holiday season following nearly three years of pandemic, the civil aviation ministry on Monday celebrated a milestone linked to the new check-in facility - DigiYatra - at airports, clocking 20,000 users within just 40 days of its launch. Civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia congratulated officials concerned at the Delhi airport, the aviation ministry and the Digi Yatra Foundation and tweeted, “Onwards & upwards from hereon.”

Currently, Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai airports have installed the DigiYatra facial recognition system.(Picture for representation)

On December 1, Scindia had launched the first phase of the Centre’s ambitious project, the DigiYatra facility, from the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) to make entry and boarding more seamless with the use of a facial recognition system.

All you need to know about DigiYatra:

• DigiYatra has been launched at three airports in the first phase – Delhi (Terminal 3), Bengaluru and Varanasi – and will be launched at other airports in a streamlined manner.
• The second phase of the DigiYatra launch – at Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune and Vijayawada airports – is expected by March this year.
• The facility will allow passengers to link their travel and identity documents and create a facial scan beforehand, doing away with the need to produce boarding passes or identity cards at the entry gate of an airport.
• The facility aims to make the boarding process seamless from the entry point until the embarkation point on planes. All that a passenger needs now is to scan the bar coded boarding pass, then show their face to a facial recognition camera to authenticate themselves; then drop their baggage, or proceed for security check and boarding.
• The service is available for users of both iPhones and Android-based smartphones.
• A passenger has to register details on the DigiYatra app using Aadhaar-based validation and a self image capture. Then the boarding pass has to be scanned and the credentials are shared with the airport.
• On concerns regarding data theft and privacy issues, Scindia said any data shared for DigiYatra will be saved in an encrypted format in a decentralised manner. “24 hours after your travel, that data is mandatorily going to be purged from the servers at that airport (even though it is protected by blockchain technology),” he said at the launch.