Digi Yatra to expand to 15 more airports in India, says Siddharth Sharma

The Digi Yatra facial recognition-based paperless travel system will be enabled at 15 more airports this year, with smaller airports next in line for integration

Digi Yatra, an initiative coordinated by the civil aviation ministry to ensure seamless travel for passengers from the airport gates to boarding a flight, will be available in 15 more airports this financial year (FY26), Siddharth Sharma, head of IT operations of Digi Yatra Foundation, said.

 

"All the metros are done, and all the big airports are done. So now we are left with the smaller airports where the ministry evaluates if there is a need at all or not. Because at times you don't need such solutions if the volume is very less, or there is just one gate," he told Business Standard.

   

Five of those new airports include Mangalore, Trivandrum, Srinagar, Chandigarh, and Nagpur. The rest are managed by the Airport Authority of India (AAI), whose infrastructure is ready, but the technology integration is still in process.

 

India has 24 of its major airports covered under Digi Yatra, which covers nearly 90 per cent of the outbound passenger traffic, Sharma added. The upcoming airports in Navi Mumbai and Noida are not part of the 15 airports, he clarified.

 

Digi Yatra’s technology, since being launched in 2022, has revolutionised travel across Indian airports through a successful implementation of self-sovereign identity or decentralised ID that allows users to control their online information. The authentication is done through two documents, the Aadhaar and the boarding pass.

 

To date, the app has been downloaded 14 million times and facilitated more than 56 million journeys across airports in India.

 

The Digi Yatra app is linked with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) ecosystem. So when a passenger downloads the app, fills in the required details – including the Aadhaar number – and gets an OTP on the phone to authenticate, UIDAI sends the Aadhaar details on the phone.  

 

 

“Then your proof of presence is established by taking your selfie and matching the selfie with the image that is there in the Aadhaar. These two things have to match with each other. What we do is we create something called a verified credential, which is like a digital photocopy with a digital stamp on it, which is called proof value. And this proof value, along with the ID document, is sent to the user's phone, which gets stored in the Digi Yatra wallet till you delete it yourself.”

 

Even for Aadhaar, Digi Yatra follows what Sharma terms as data minimisation. Only a passenger’s name, gender, date of birth, and masked Aadhaar number are taken. “Your address is not pulled because that is not required for the use case. So privacy by design says that data minimisation should be drilled to the core.”

 

The second step of the journey involves uploading the boarding pass, where the technology pulls the data from the QR code, which includes date of travel, name, seat number, PNR, origin, destination, and sequence number.

 

“When you link your boarding pass, we match the name that you had linked earlier from your Aadhaar and the name on the boarding pass. If these two things match, along with the real-time facial image clicked at the airport, the gate opens. All this is happening automatically. There is no human intervention,” explains Sharma.

 

When asked about the data security concerns, he says data shared with the origin airport is deleted from Digi Yatra's biometric gallery within 24 hours of the flight departure. “It is like instantly the data is false because that's how the architecture is designed. The airports also cannot retain the data as per policy.

 

Digi Yatra also conducts audits once a year at these airports, which are Digi Yatra-enabled, to ensure that they are following this policy guideline and they have systemic scripts in place. “Some airports deleted it within four hours, some airports within five hours. Some airports deleted it as per the policy required guidelines from the CISF and other security agencies.”