More than 1.6 lakh passengers have availed the Digi Yatra facility at the airports from the day of its launch on December 1, 2022 to February 14, 2023 and the numbers are steadily growing, informed the Ministry of Civil Aviation in a formal statement.
The total app user base of Digi Yatra on the Android Play Store & iOS Apple App Store now stands at 422K. Among the cities, Varanasi came out to be the most receptive with the number of Digi Yatra users having increased from 0.09 per cent of total passengers on December 1, 2022 to 28 per cent of total passengers on February 13, 2023 with the highest of 37 per cent of total users on February 2.
Digi Yatra is being implemented across airports in a phased manner. In its first phase, the facility was introduced at Delhi, Bengaluru, and Varanasi airports by the Minister of Civil Aviation, Jyotiraditya M Scindia on December 1. Next, it will be launched at Kolkata, Pune, Vijayawada, and Hyderabad Airports by March 2023.
Digi Yatra is an important step that we have been able to implement after 3-4 years of hard work. The AAI had been effectively involved under the ministry and with the help of private operators, we have made an ecosystem ready where software is made separately and hardware is kept at the airport so that passengers could have a faceless identification and travel faster.
A voluntary facility, Digi Yatra is a biometric boarding system using Facial Recognition Technology to provide a seamless experience for passengers at airports. It eliminates the need for verification of ticket and ID at multiple touchpoints.
All the passenger’s data is encrypted and stored in the wallet of the passenger’s smartphone and shared only for a limited time duration with the airport of travel origin where the passenger’s Digi Yatra ID needs to be validated. The data is purged from the system within 24 hours of the flight.
