Union civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia on Monday hailed the rapid uptick in the usage of the DigiYatra app at Varanasi airport, saying that it had improved the ease of travel considerably.
“The ever-increasing usage of #DigiYatra App at Varanasi Airport is encouraging from the perspective of ease of travel. All air passengers are requested to download the app as soon as possible and experience the convenience of travel for themselves,” he said in a tweet in Hindi.
The minister also posted a chart showing a surge in users in 20 days, since the app was launched at Varanasi airport on December 1.
On the same day, the app was also launched at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport and Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport during the first phase.
As part of the second phase, the system will be launched in Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune and Vijayawada by March next year, Scindia had said earlier.
The DigiYatra facility will allow passengers to link their travel and identity documents and create a facial scan beforehand, which will do away with the need for them to produce boarding passes or identity cards when they arrive at an airport, drop their baggage, or proceed for boarding. Instead, passengers will need to show their face to a facial recognition camera to authenticate themselves.
{{/usCountry}}The DigiYatra facility will allow passengers to link their travel and identity documents and create a facial scan beforehand, which will do away with the need for them to produce boarding passes or identity cards when they arrive at an airport, drop their baggage, or proceed for boarding. Instead, passengers will need to show their face to a facial recognition camera to authenticate themselves.
{{/usCountry}}For availing the service, a passenger has to register details on the DigiYatra app using Aadhaar-based validation and a self image capture. In the next step, the boarding pass has to be scanned and the credentials are shared with the airport.
At the airport e-gate, the passenger has to first scan the bar coded boarding pass and the facial recognition system installed at the e-gate will validate the passenger’s identity and travel document. Once this process is done, the passenger can enter the airport through the e-gate. The passenger will have to follow the usual procedure to clear security and board the aircraft.
Amid concerns over data theft and privacy issues, Scindia said the data shared for DigiYatra will be saved in an encrypted format in a decentralised manner.
“We have moved to a decentralised system and your data is going to be in an encrypted format and it is going to be residing only in your (passenger) mobile phone... 24 hours after your travel, that data is mandatorily going to be purged from the servers at that airport,” he said at the launch of the app.