The number of air passengers who have installed the Digi Yatra application on their mobile phones in India has crossed one million this week indicating the growing popularity of the app that ensures a quicker check-in at airports, according to data released by the Civil Aviation Ministry today.
Interestingly, Varanasi has recorded the highest percentage of passengers using the Digi Yatra app at 76.4% while Vijayawada comes at the second rank with 62.2% flyers making use of the app for boarding their flights.
The number of total passengers with Digi Yatra apps is highest for Delhi airport at 6.48 lakhs followed by Bengaluru with 5.04 lakhs. However, the percentage of air passengers using the app at the two airports is 19% and 14.3% respectively for the two metropolitan cities.
The other airports that use Dig Yatra are: Kolkata 18.03 lakh passengers with 18.7% using the facility. Pune (10.41 lakh with 23.2% using the app) and Hyderabad 37,133 passengers with 4.7% using the facility.
Since its inauguration by Minister of Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya M. Scindia on 1st December 2022, as many as 1.75 million people have used this facility.
Digi Yatra is an initiative of the Ministry of Civil Aviation for a biometric boarding system using facial biometric verification technology. It aims at providing a seamless and hassle-free experience for passengers at airports. It facilitates the boarding of flights for passengers by eliminating the need for manual verification of tickets and ID at multiple touch points. This also helps to achieve better throughput through existing infrastructure using a Digital Framework.
Digi Yatra was initially launched at three airports, New Delhi, Bengaluru, and Varanasi in December 2022 which was followed by Vijayawada, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Pune in April 2023.
In the Digi Yatra process, there is no central storage of passengers Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data. All the passengers’ data is encrypted and stored in the wallet of the passengers’ 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. The data is shared by passengers directly, only when they travel and only to the origin Airport. The data cannot be used by any other entity since it’s encrypted and cannot be shared with any stakeholders, according to the Civil Aviation Ministry statement.
