3 Indian airports to now have facial recognition-based entry: Check details

Civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said the data shared for DigiYatra will be stored in an encrypted format in a decentralised manner.

New Delhi, Dec 01: The government on Thursday launched DigiYatra that allows entry of air passengers based on a facial recognition system at the airport in Delhi, Bangalore and Varanasi.Digi Yatra is conceived to achieve contactless, seamless processing of passengers at airports based on Facial Recognition Technology (FRT).

The DigiYatra will be launched at four more airports Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune, and Vijayawada by March 2023. Later it would be implemented across various airports in the country.

The service is presently being launched for domestic flights passengers only. Digi Yatra App is available on both IoS and android. It is voluntary is nature.

The project has tremendous advantages of improving passenger convenience and ease of travel.

About the privacy features of the project, Union Minister for Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia said that keeping in mind the privacy, there is no central storage of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Passenger's ID and travel credentials are stored in a secure wallet in the passenger's smartphone itself. The uploaded data will utilise blockchain technology and all the data will be purged from the servers within 24 hours of use.

With Digi Yatra, India will now stand in the ranks of world class airports like Heathrow in London and Atlanta in United States of America. Elucidating on the benefits of Digi Yatra, the Minister stated the example of Dubai Airport where passenger time upto 40 percent was saved due to this technology. A similar technology saved nine minutes per aircraft time at the Atlanta Airport.

How to use?

To use this facility, one-time registration on Digi Yatra app is required using Aadhar 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 normal procedure to clear the security and board the aircraft.