Digi Yatra keeps expanding, learns from growing pains

Digi Yatra Foundation CEO Suresh Khadakbhavi is on the PR trail, as India’s biometric app to facilitate quicker boarding prepares to expand coverage to international travel. The airport ID verification system has faced hiccups, including an unexpected app migration that puzzled users. But proponents say it needs to progress more quickly toward mass adoption, to eliminate bottlenecks at Indian airports.

After India expansion, Digi Yatra hopes to go international

An article in Skift reports on Khadakbhavi’s comments at the recent Future Aviation Forum in Riyadh, in which the CEO says the Digi Yatra Foundation expects to start testing a prototype for chipped electronic passport-based enrollment next month.

Launched in 2022 at three major travel hubs, the Digi Yatra system has grown quickly. It is now in place at fourteen airports across India, in Delhi, Bengaluru, Varanasi, Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata, Vijayawada, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Cochin, Guwahati, Jaipur and Lucknow. It will soon be available at 28, covering roughly 90 percent of Indian travelers. It is also seeking to expand coverage to offer biometric check-in at hotels and frictionless access to gated public spaces.

In the slightly longer term, the Foundation is looking at a partnership with the International Air Transport Association (IATA)’s One ID initiative for global interoperability, to facilitate smooth, biometrically-enabled travel experiences internationally.

Khadakbhavi has emphasized Digi Yatra’s embrace of a decentralized self-sovereign identity (SSI) system, which encodes face biometrics as a single token, as a critical piece in building bilateral international agreements on digital identity credentials.

Migration to upgrade back end yields valuable lessons

Growth, of course, comes with pains, and Digi Yatra’s rapid expansion has left it with some explaining to do. An update to the app ahead of its expansion to 28 airports perplexed users, who wondered why they were being asked to replace the original Digi Yatra app, and worried about a potential data breach. Low user ratings on the new app did not help the muddied messaging.

The fumbled migration, which the organization says was to facilitate “a significant backend upgrade,” cost the app millions of users: one month after the incident, it has only 2 million, less than half of the original Digi Yatra app’s roughly 4.5 million. In an interview with BT Tech Today, Khadakbhavi says uptake has increased since the system added a prompt in the original app pointing users to the new version. He says the organization learned important lessons about the need to build scalable features into its facial recognition app at a foundational level.

One future plan for Digi Yatra on the safety side is to implement fully homomorphic encryption, which means data can only be shared and accessed once. This may help alleviate concerns about consensual collection of biometrics, and how that biometric data is handled.

Digi Yatra yet to eliminate airport queues, says former airline exec

Although Khadakbhavi’s comments might suggest a more patient and calculated approach to rollout, some still think Digi Yatra cannot grow fast enough. In a post on X, popularly called Twitter, former Jet Airways CEO Sanjiv Kapoor gripes about delays caused by current airport entry methods.

“India is the only major country I am aware of that requires this,” he writes, referring to “Airport entry queues and ID/ticket checks.” Kapoor says Digi Yatra is a good option for the digitally-savvy, but laments that it is not yet live for international travel.

Article Topics

airports  |  biometrics  |  Digi Yatra  |  face biometrics  |  identity verification  |  India  |  mobile app  |  OneID