Introduction
No tickets… no touch… no problem! That’s what was promised by the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) back in July of 2017 when DigiYatra was first proposed as an initiative to replace dated, legacy methods of passenger processing across Indian Airports. The overarching goal is to eliminate the requirement surrounding providing physical ID and travel documents at every checkpoint, often leading to operational bottlenecks and slowing down, or bringing to a halt, the flow of passengers through the airport.
Why Indian Airports Needed DigiYatra
While operational bottlenecks leading to increased wait times at common pressure points across the airport journey, namely pre-security and boarding, are not exclusive to India and its network of ~150 airports, estimated to balloon to ~220 by 2030, it was essential for it to be addressed due to the ever-increasing population and passenger volume levels that India is challenged with managing. As of 2024, India reportedly saw domestic air passenger traffic rise to 161.3 million, a growth of 6.12% from the year prior, with domestic passenger numbers expected to further rise to 300 million by 2030. Due to this massive increase in passenger volume expected across the next decade, the adoption of self-service, automated and biometrically enabled solutions which aim to speed up passenger processing is non-negotiable.
Alongside the expected increase in passenger volume, the population of India is also skyrocketing. It’s currently sitting at 1.4bn in 2023, but expected to increase towards the north-end of 1.5bn by 2035. Similar to the surge in passenger volume, with the growth in population, further validating the need for smart technologies to facilitate a seamless passenger journey. Also, the lack of a viable alternative form of ID further extrapolates the need for biometrically-enabled solutions. With only limited ePassport issuance to date and many processes being paper based, it was essential for India to develop a solution that can seamlessly verify and advance passengers quickly through their airport journey, and DigiYatra aims to do just that.
In its simplest form, DigiYatra requires passengers to pre-enroll through the dedicated application off-site with their Aadhar credentials (unique 12 digit ID number predicated on biometric and demographic data), upload a selfie and then link their boarding pass, ultimately creating a biometric boarding pass that can be used to seamlessly pass through the terminal entry, pre-security and boarding checkpoints. In December 2022, DigiYatra was officially launched at three major Indian airports, notably Indira Ghandi (IGI), Kempegowda (BLR) and Varanasi (VNS) with the goal of creating a seamless passenger journey through biometrically-enabled hardware and the necessary supporting back-end infrastructure. Upon the pilot being successful, , leading to the announcement from SITA in July 2023 stating that it struck a landmark deal with the Airports Authority of India (AAI) to provide 2,700 passenger touchpoints to 43 of India’s biggest airports, showing India’s wider commitment to offering smart technologies to all of its citizens. Also, in 2023, IDEMIA was announced as a key technology partner to DigiYatra, providing its facial, fingerprint, and iris verification technologies to accurately identify and power the system. As of June 2025, DigiYatra is in 24 airports, with plans to expand into four more airports in the near future. Further installations of smart hardware into Indian airports will be captured and recorded in future iterations of our Smart Airports Market Tracker.
The Story of DigiYatra’s Use Case
The story of the DigiYatra scheme can be likened to the Hockey Stick Theory, which explains the growth pattern of businesses entering a new market or developing a new product. It highlights how growth is often slow across its infant years, until the point of inflexion is met, which is the turning point for meteoric growth and popularity, followed by steady growth and maturity within the marketplace. In DigiYatra’s case, the initiative started off relatively slowly, with the first pilots being small in nature in 2019, being used only for specific domestic flights and gates; mainly used by airport staff and select frequent flyers to demonstrate the viability of biometrics and facial recognition being used in an end-to-end passenger journey. After this, the , further slowing down any further expansion with trials or wider launches. Passenger numbers on domestic flights dropped by 62% in 2020 when compared to 2019, with ~141m passengers carried in 2019 and only ~53m carried in 2020.
This section of DigiYatra’s story can be likened to the ‘blade’ of the hockey stick, which entails the foundational work in which the scheme was being developed, essential teams were being formed, and small pilots undertaken to prove the technology. In 2022, the scheme was officially launched as a full-scale pilot at the previously mentioned three airports. Initial growth was slow, but it built momentum as travelers became aware of the programme and started to perceive the benefits that come with biometrically-enabled passenger processing in airports. To further illustrate the growth of the scheme, in 2023, the app saw 3.5m downloads and over 9m seamless passenger journeys facilitated, with these numbers further jumping to 9m downloads and 42m journeys processed in 2024. DigiYatra graduated from pilot schemes and was rolled out in full-scale launches across large airports in India. We believe it reached its inflexion point towards the end of 2024, with DigiYatra being implemented in 24 airports across India and boasting an average of 30,000 app downloads daily. While these numbers are large in isolation, in the context of India and its vast potential and rapid development, the usage of DigiYatra feels like a drop in the ocean, with more infrastructure being built out to facilitate its long-term growth.
The continued fast growth of DigiYatra’s usage and penetration into further Indian airports will be the key factor that helps to facilitate the move towards the maturity phase, likely being realised in the next 5-10 years. Moving forward, it plans to expand towards international travel, with a pilot that was scheduled for June 2025 entailing the connection between India and another country through the leveraging of DigiYatra – with the pilot being set for use by foreign passengers who have biometrically-enabled passports.
Controversies Surrounding DigiYatra
While most believe that smart hardware, biometrics and a seamless passenger journey is of value and benefit to passengers, there is a flip side; a portion of passengers worry about potential misuse and storage of their biometric data, and DigiYatra isn’t an exception. In 2022, at Hyderabad Airport, there were reports of passengers being photographed for enrolment into the DigiYatra programme without their consent, with consent of course being the backbone and a necessary requirement of any biometrically-leveraged system. We believe that consent is the social backbone that holds the programme upright for a multitude of reasons, but the largest one being that if passengers cannot establish that baseline level of trust, they will undoubtedly be steered away from enrolling into the programme. This is directly countering the point of DigiYatra, with the goal being to leverage biometrics to amplify the passenger journey in the airport. With a system that revolves so heavily around the usage of personal biometric data, it’s essential that the requisite trust and assurance is there between the platform and the user, with the user having an understanding of how and where their biometric data is being utilised, and for them to understand that it’s an optional service, not mandatory. However, this has been vehemently denied by India’s Civil Aviation Ministry and by DigiYatra’s CEO Suresh Khadakabhavi, when he stated that there is no central database for DigiYatra, rather that data is securely stored on the user’s phone in a decentralised manner, rather than storing sensitive information in a centralised database, prioritising privacy above all else.
Positioning DigiYatra for the Future
With DigiYatra’s expansion across Indian airports, it’s natural to think ahead and how the scheme can position itself to further spread across India and explore potential synergies with other regions and their unique biometrically-enabled border control solutions to allow DigiYatra to expand internationally. Additionally, based on the numbers mentioned earlier, in 2023, the average DigiYatra user used the programme 2.57 times a year, with that number seeing an uptick to 4.67 times per year in 2024. Clearly frequent fliers are seeing the benefit of DigiYatra, but a challenge going forward will be to find ways to encourage less frequent fliers, maybe nationals who travel once a year, to sign up for the scheme.
However, with any innovation, trust is an essential factor – passengers need to know and be assured that their data is being used responsibly and in line with their expectations. Expect India to keep on developing this programme, with it eventually being accessible to the vast majority of domestically travelling passengers, and potentially an expansion into the wider international market with foreign citizens also being able to leverage the smart solution to make their passenger journey as seamless as possible. Looking at the long-term outlook of DigiYatra, it could become one of, if not the largest Biometrically Enabled Seamless Travel (BEST) programmes in the world, based upon the sheer volume of passengers in India and the objective to deploy DigiYatra across all airports.
A full analysis of DigiYatra and its impact on the aviation sector alongside its effects on APAC (Asia Pacific and China) and global forecasts can be accessed in our report on “The Seamless Passenger Journey in Smart Airports – 2025“.
