‘Digi-Yatra’ For Digital India, Airports To Go Paperless As Government Plans Facial Recognition For Boarding Flights 

Union aviation minister Suresh Prabhu announced on Thursday (4 October) about its plans to introduce facial recognition to board flights reported The Times of India.

Technology that uses the face as the boarding card for domestic flights is set to be implemented at Hyderabad and Bangalore airports by the end of February 2019. Varanasi, Kolkata and Pune will join subsequently.

“The facial recognition based passenger processing system - a common standard being adopted world over will help provide a seamless passenger experience right from the airport entry up to the boarding of the aircraft,” said Suresh Prabhu in a Tweet.

"Passengers will be taken at face value," said the minister while announcing the plans to introduce facial recognition based access system to make flight experience passengers seamless.

'Digi Yatra(DY)' initiative which aims at making paperless boarding of domestic aircrafts a reality, where each flyer who wishes to opt for a voluntary DY will have to generate a unique DY-ID at the aviation ministry portal, and all the passengers have to use this unique ID for flights.

Passengers could book tickets using this unique ID by verifying it with any of the proofs, if one chooses Aadhaar, verification could be done online.

Once successfully authenticated, the photo of the passenger will be added into DY profile secured at a central database. They could then scan code of their e-boarding and validate passenger and flight details. The e-gates will open once the face verification is done.

Apart from this, the governments expect DY to accelerate the throughput of the passenger, reduces the number of workforce deployments at various points for checking IDs and travel documents ensuring a paperless and smooth travel experience to passengers.