India To Get Digi Yatra Digital Boarding Facility At 6 Airports Soon; Mumbai, Kochi On The List

The Digi Yatra facility will be launched at Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Lucknow, Jaipur, and Guwahati airports in the month of August, taking the no. of airports with this technology to 13.

Image: Arjit Garg/ Zee Mobility

The Airport Authority of India and Ministry of Civil Aviation will launch the Digi Yatra paperless boarding facility at 6 more airports in India soon. As per a PIB press release, the digital boarding facility will be enabled in airports, namely Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Lucknow, Jaipur, and Guwahati in the month of August 2023. With the addition of the aforementioned six airports, the total number of Digi Yatra-enabled airports will become thirteen. The implementation and installation of Digi Yatra infrastructure at these airports will take place in a phased manner.

Since its launch by Minister of Civil Aviation and Steel Shri Jyotiraditya on December 1, 2022, at three airports, New Delhi, Varanasi, and Bengaluru, Digi Yatra has been implemented at four more airports, Vijayawada, Pune, Hyderabad, and Kolkata increasing the number of Digi Yatra airports to seven. By August 10, 2023, Digi Yatra has been used by 34,60,454 passengers. By the same date, the Digi Yatra mobile application user base was 1.29 million.

Digi Yatra is a mobile application-based facility conceived to achieve contactless, seamless processing of passengers at airports based on Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). It helps travelers pass through various checkpoints at the airports through paperless and contactless processing using facial features to validate their identity and travel details.

In the Digi Yatra process, there is no central storage of passenger's Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data. All the passengers' data is encrypted and stored in the wallet of their smartphone. It is shared only between the passenger and the airport of travel origin, where the passenger's Digi Yatra ID needs to be validated.

The data is purged from the airport's system within 24 hours of departure of the flight. The data is shared by passengers directly, only when they travel and only to the origin Airport. India is among few countries in India to enable digital boarding for passengers on domestic routes.