Looking to extend Digi Yatra facility to international passengers: Scindia

Providing Digi Yatra facility to international passengers is a complex task, and the Ministry of Civil Aviation is coordinating with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on this matter, Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said on Thursday.

Passengers who have enrolled on the Digi Yatra app can pass through all checkpoints in the airport using facial features for identity verification. Currently, the Digi Yatra facility is available to domestic passengers at 13 major airports in India. These 13 airports handle about 85 per cent of domestic air traffic.

"We want to expand it domestically so that in 2024-25, we are looking at 11 airports in H1 (first half) and another 14 airports in H2 (second half). This means this 13 will go to 38 by the end of 2024-25," Scindia said after presiding over an event where Airbus and Dynamatic Technologies signed an agreement to jointly manufacture all door variants for A220 family aircraft in India.

"As we have got the learnings from Digi Yatra, we are also looking at extending it to international passengers, but the complexities there are different. We have to make sure that we coordinate with the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Home Affairs, because the concept of e-passport and e-visa, all of that has to be built on this platform," the minister noted.

"Therefore, we are working on it as we speak. All I can tell you is that we are committed to extending it laterally as well as deepening it domestically to other airports as well," he stated. Till December 23 last year, over 3.5 million users had downloaded the Digi Yatra app.

Digi Yatra's central ecosystem is managed by Digi Yatra Foundation, a not-for-profit company made under the Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013, and hence does not come under the ambit of Right to Information (RTI) Act, Minister of State for Civil Aviation V K Singh told the Rajya Sabha on February 5.

As per the guidelines issued by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, Digi Yatra is a decentralised mobile wallet-based identity management platform. "The personal information of the passenger is stored in the mobile wallet of the traveller. The same are shared with the departure airport in encrypted format, and data is purged from the system after 24 hours of departure of flight. This addresses the data protection issues in the implementation of Digi Yatra. Further, the Digi Yatra processes are subjected to audits and certification by CERT-In empanelled agencies to ensure adherence to data privacy and security standards," Singh noted.