Digi Yatra is proposed to be rolled out at two airports, Varanasi and Bengaluru, in August and at five airports, Pune, Vijayawada, Kolkata, Delhi and Hyderabad, by March next year.The project envisages that any traveller may pass through various checkpoints at the airport through a paperless and contactless processing, using facial features to establish the identity which would be linked to the boarding pass.
In a consultative committee meeting held on Monday, Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said that it is a project conceived to achieve contactless, seamless processing of passengers at airports based on the Facial Recognition Technology (FRT).
The minister said that the privacy issues have been taken care of in the system, which provides a decentralised mobile wallet-based identity management platform that is cost-effective and addresses privacy/data protection issues in the implementation of Digi Yatra.
After the approval of the revised Digi Yatra guidelines, an aeronautical information circular (AIC) was published by DGCA on April 18.The Digi Yatra Foundation (DYF) was set up as a joint venture company in 2019 under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013, whose shareholders are AAI (26 per cent) and BIAL, DIAL, GHIAL, MIAL and CIAL, which hold the remaining 74 per cent of the shares.
The DYF was formed with the objective of creating the Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem (DYCE). It is a pan-India entity and the custodian of the passenger ID validation process. It will also develop consensus among the aviation stakeholders in India.
It would also define the criteria for compliance and guidelines for the local airport systems. The JV will conduct regular audits of the various compliances and guidelines (including guidelines on security, image quality, data privacy) defined by the Digi Yatra guidelines for the local airport biometric boarding systems (BBS).