Consultative Committee of Ministry of Civil Aviation discusses DIGI YATRA project
The Consultative Committee meeting of Ministry of Civil Aviation was
held in New Delhi today. The topic for discussion was ‘DIGI YATRA’. Members of
Parliament, who are Members of the Committee, took part in the meeting and made
certain valuable suggestions about the project.
Giving the background of ‘DIGI
YATRA’, the Union Minister of Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya M Scindia said that
it is a project conceived to achieve contactless, seamless processing of
passengers at Airports, based on Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). The
project basically envisages that any traveller may pass through various check
points at the airport through a paperless and contactless processing, using
facial features to establish the identity which would be linked to the boarding
pass. He said that the privacy issues have been taken care of in the system. It
provides for decentralized mobile wallet based identity management platform
which is cost effective and addresses privacy/ data protection issues in
implementation of Digi Yatra. After approval of the revised Digi Yatra
guidelines, an AIC (Aeronautical Information Circular) has been published by
DGCA on 18.04.2022.
Digi Yatra Foundation (DYF) has
been set up as a joint venture (JV) company in 2019 under Section 8 of
the Companies Act, 2013 whose shareholders are AAI (26% shares) and BIAL, DIAL,
GHIAL, MIAL and CIAL. These 5 shareholders equally hold the remaining 74% of
the shares. The Foundation was formed, with the objective of creating the Digi
Yatra Central Ecosystem (DYCE). Digi Yatra Foundation will be a pan-India
entity and the custodian of the Passenger ID validation process. It will also
develop consensus amongst 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).
In first phase, Digi Yatra is
proposed to be rolled out at two Airports namely Varanasi and Bengaluru in
August 2022 and at five Airports namely Pune, Vijayawada, Kolkata, Delhi and
Hyderabad by March next year. AAI will identify their airports where Digi Yatra
would be implemented in phased manner.