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India looking to extend digi yatra facility to international passengers: Scindia
Currently, the Digi Yatra facility is available to domestic passengers at 13 major airports in India. These 13 airports handle about 85%
New Delhi: The government is aiming to commence Digi Yatra for even international passengers, Union civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said on Thursday. “...We have got learnings of (rolling) Digi Yatra…we are looking at extending it to international passengers,” he said.
Currently, the Digi Yatra facility is available to domestic passengers at 13 major airports in India. These 13 airports handle about 85%.
Scindia however said that the civil aviation ministry will have to coordinate with other ministries for the facility to be used for international passengers. “...There are complexities ...we have to coordinate with the ministry of external affairs, the home affairs, the concepts of e-passports, the e-visas...all of that has to be built on this platform…Therefore, we are working on that as we speak..,” he stated.
Scindia also said that the government aims to introduce the facility to an additional 25 airports by the end of FY 2025.
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“We are committed to extending that both laterally, as well as deeply domestically at other airports,” he said, adding, “We want to extend the facility, based on the experience that we had with DigiYatra in terms of rolling it out at 13 airports which covers roughly about 85-86% of domestic travellers.”
“We currently have 13 domestic airports that cover around 80-85% of domestic traffic. We are looking to add 11 airports in the first half and 13 airports in the second half of FY 2025, which means we will have 38 airports with facilities by the end of FY 2024-25,” Scindia said.
The Digi Yatra facility is a project introduced to achieve contactless, seamless processing of passengers at Airports based on Facial Recognition Technology (FRT).
In a written reply to a question regarding the data privacy concerns in Digi Yatra, the minister of state for civil aviation General VK Singh (Retd), on Monday, said the Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem (DYCE) is built on the fundamental tenets of privacy by design and default, and there is no central storage of passenger’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data.
The facility is currently available in Delhi, Bengaluru, Varanasi, Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata, Vijayawada, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Cochin, Guwahati, Jaipur, and Lucknow. Till December 23 last year, over 3.5 million users had downloaded the Digi Yatra app.
