Good news for air passengers! Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Lucknow, Jaipur and Guwahati airports to get this high-tech feature

The Ministry of Civil Aviation has announced that Digi Yatra facility will be launched at 6 more airports — Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Lucknow, Jaipur, and Guwahati — in the month of August, taking the total number of Digi Yatra-compliant airports to 13. The Ministry said that the implementation and installation of Digi Yatra infrastructure at these airports will take place in a phased manner.

Digi Yatra-enabled airports so far

Upon its launch on December 1, 2022,  by Minister of Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia, Digi Yatra was first enabled at New Delhi, Varanasi, and Bengaluru airports.

Since then, four more airports — Vijayawada, Pune, Hyderabad, and Kolkata — have become Digi Yatra compliant, taking the number of Digi Yatra-enabled airports to seven. 

With the addition of the aforementioned six airports, the total number of Digi Yatra-enabled airports will rise to thirteen.

Digi Yatra usage by passengers

The Ministry informed that by August 10, 2023, Digi Yatra has been used by 34,60,454 passengers. By the same date, the Digi Yatra mobile application user base was 12.9 lakh.

What is Digi Yatra?

Digi Yatra is a mobile application-based facility conceived to achieve contactless, seamless processing of passengers at airports based on Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). It helps travelers pass through various checkpoints at the airports through paperless and contactless processing using facial features to validate their identity and travel details.

In the Digi Yatra process, there is no central storage of passenger's Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data. All the passengers' data is encrypted and stored in the wallet of their smartphone. It is shared only between the passenger and the airport of travel origin, where the passenger's Digi Yatra ID needs to be validated. The data is purged from the airport's system within 24 hours of departure of the flight. The data is shared by passengers directly, only when they travel and only to the origin Airport.