New Delhi, December 1
The government on Thursday launched DigiYatra which will provide a seamless entry and embarkation process for air passengers at the airports in the National Capital, Bangalore and Varanasi.
After launching DigiYatra, which is based on facial recognition technology, at the airport in Delhi, Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said data shared by the passengers will be stored in an encrypted format and in a decentralised manner.
DigiYatra will be launched at four more airports—Hyderabad, Pune, Vijayawada and Kolkata—by March next year.
Later, DigiYatra will be rapidly rolled out across all other airports, Scindia said at a briefing here.
The airlines that operate in these three airports—Delhi, Bangalore and Varanasi—are fundamentally on board, he said with respect to DigiYatra.
It will be available for passengers taking domestic flights.
DigiYatra app is available on Android and ioS platforms. Currently at the Delhi airport, DigiYatra will be available for passengers taking domestic flights from Terminal 3 (T3).
Amid concerns in certain quarters about data theft and privacy issues, Scindia said the data shared for DigiYatra will be stored in an encrypted format in a decentralised manner.
“First, we thought of a centralised system that would house all the data but then issues of privacy, data theft, rightfully came up. So, we moved to a decentralised system which would house the passenger information.. on the mobile phones of every single passenger,” the minister said.
The secured, encrypted information on a passenger’s phone can be provided to the airport from which he or she is flying out, 24 hours before the journey.
