The digital imperative: How Digi Yatra’s biometric blueprint is redefining airport operations and efficiency

For those working within the fast-paced aviation sector, the challenge is universal: how do you manage soaring passenger volumes while delivering enhanced efficiency, robust security, and a superior travel experience? The answer lies in digital transformation, and India’s groundbreaking Digi Yatra programme offers a proven, scalable blueprint for success.

Air travel is booming globally, and airports are increasingly pressured to move passengers faster, more efficiently, and more safely than ever before. India, currently the world’s third-largest domestic aviation market, is expected to serve 500 million passengers by 2030. The Ministry of Civil Aviation and the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security developed Digi Yatra to meet this demand, transitioning the industry away from physical entry processes and manual checks towards biometric-enabled digital processing.

Operational excellence: Driving efficiency with biometrics

Digi Yatra leverages facial recognition technology (FRT) to create a truly seamless and frictionless passenger journey, transforming bottlenecks into streamlined processes. This efficiency directly benefits airport operations:

• Speed and throughput: Instead of standing in long queues across multiple airport checkpoints, enrolled passengers now pass through the gates in just five seconds using their faces as a single token.

• Reduced burden on personnel: The system significantly reduces the operational burden on airport personnel who previously had to manually verify identity and flight details constantly.

• Proven scale: The initiative has already facilitated over 60 million seamless domestic journeys. Currently, 4.5 million users rely on Digi Yatra for entry, check-in, and boarding, with the application being used nearly 27 million times across the country.

The system covers terminal entry gates, security checks, baggage drop, and aircraft boarding, enabling a paperless experience without the hassles of repeated identity checks. For airport executives, this translates directly into significant hours saved daily when managing thousands or millions of passengers. The success is evident, with Pune International Airport, for example, facilitating the travel of more than a million passengers on one day thanks to this innovative ecosystem.

A revolutionary technological and security model 

What makes Digi Yatra truly pathbreaking is its underlying technological framework, built on principles that address modern security and privacy concerns.

Digi Yatra is founded on the concept of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and a decentralised mobile-based ID storage system. This is critical for maintaining high security standards:

1. Privacy by Design (PbD): The platform is designed with a strong security framework that prioritises passenger data safety.

2. Decentralisation: Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data is not stored in any central location. Instead, credentials are stored locally on the users’ own mobile phones, dramatically reducing the risk of a central data breach, loss, misuse, theft, or pilferage.

3. Data Purge: Passengers only share their data while they travel, and the information is purged from the application system within 24 hours of flight departure.

The system adheres to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, utilising verifiable credentials (VCs), decentralised identifiers (DIDs), and a distributed ledger technology (DLT) layer (e.g., Hyperledger Aries Go/ACAPy). This sophisticated, forward-thinking approach positions India as a torchbearer in implementing self-sovereign identity-based solutions for travel.

Underpinning this success are four core pillars: connected passengers, connected flying, connected airports, and connected systems, ensuring easy entry at all checkpoints.

Your next strategic move: Learn from the leaders

The Digi Yatra platform, which has expanded to 16 major Indian airports, plans to integrate its technology across 15 additional airports, taking the domestic total to 29. The ultimate vision includes global expansion and extending the use case to broader transportation and hospitality industries.

As airport leaders navigate increasing traffic demands and digital expectations, leveraging insights from proven transformations is essential.

Join the Digi Yatra Foundation and IDEMIA to discover the blueprint behind this successful revolution by joining the live webinar below taking place on December 16 2025.