What India’s DigiYatra Reveals About the Architecture of Frictionless Travel

When the Indian government announced DigiYatra in June 2017, the promise was faster, paperless air travel built around facial recognition instead of repeated document checks. A passenger’s face would serve as their boarding pass.

Eight years on, DigiYatra has evolved into a nationwide digital system operating across airport entry points, security checks, and boarding gates. It is also increasingly at the center of a debate that goes beyond convenience, touching on privacy, consent, labor practices and the ownership of public-facing digital platforms.

For policymakers and airport operators, the question is no longer whether facial recognition can speed up passenger flows, but who is accountable when biometric systems become core public infrastructure rather than optional convenience tools.

DigiYatra relies on biometric data to function. Passengers enroll through a mobile application or, in limited cases, airport kiosks, sharing identity information, facial images and flight details to create a digital travel credential that is verified at multiple checkpoints.

That dependence on sensitive personal data has drawn scrutiny from privacy advocates from the outset. Questions have focused on how biometric data is stored, who controls it, whether it can be shared, and what safeguards exist in the event of a breach.

In April 2023, the Internet Freedom Foundation wrote to the Ministry of Civil Aviation flagging concerns about DigiYatra’s use of facial recognition technology (FRT) and the lack of transparency around data governance and accountability.

DigiYatra Foundation chief executive Suresh Khadakbhavi says the platform’s design is intended to address those risks. In an interview with MIT Sloan Management Review India, he said the system deliberately avoids centralized storage of passenger data.

“There is no central repository of personally identifiable information,” he said. “Since we went live on December 1, 2022, we have never stored passenger identities in a central database. We know the number of app downloads, but we do not know who those users are.”

Encrypted data is shared with airport systems only for the duration of a specific journey and is automatically purged within 24 hours of the scheduled departure time.

“When there is no central database, there is nothing to hack,” he said.

Privacy researchers have said that decentralization reduces single-point failure risk, but does not eliminate concerns around consent quality, third-party access at endpoints, or auditability in systems that sit outside RTI oversight.

Even so, the model requires passengers to accept several assurances on trust. DigiYatra Foundation does not fall under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, limiting citizens’ ability to independently seek audit reports, security assessments, or technical documentation.

With the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and its accompanying rules now in force, DigiYatra is legally categorized as a data fiduciary. That places enforceable obligations on consent, purpose limitation and data security. How those obligations will be tested in a system built around biometric verification remains an open question.

Consent has been another point of friction. During the early rollout, airports allowed passengers to enroll at kiosks for a single journey if they had not downloaded the app. Some users later complained that they did not fully understand that they had opted into DigiYatra.

Khadakbhavi attributes this to early-stage implementation choices.

“Airport authorities said that if a person is not enrolled in the DigiYatra app, we will allow them to enroll at the kiosk only for that particular journey,” he said. “You have to scan your boarding pass and then your face gets captured, and there are consent forms which you have to click and accept.”

He said kiosk-based enrolments now account for a small minority of users as app-based registration has become the norm.

The episode has since been cited by civil society groups as an example of how design choices at scale can blur the line between informed consent and procedural compliance.

Critics have also questioned whether DigiYatra feeds into a wider surveillance ecosystem. Khadakbhavi rejects that characterization.

“It is certainly not surveillance,” he said. “You come by your own free will to that particular checkpoint. It is not like DigiYatra is capturing somebody’s face anywhere and everywhere.”

The system’s vulnerabilities are not limited to data governance. In late November, operations at Surat International Airport were disrupted after around 40 DigiYatra staff went on strike over unpaid salaries. With staff absent, biometric gates were shut and passengers were processed manually.

The disruption was traced to a contracting failure. A vendor appointed by the Airports Authority of India had its GST registration cancelled earlier in the year, preventing payments from being processed. Without payments, salaries went unpaid. Surat had not yet formally launched DigiYatra, but passengers were already using the system during a trial phase.

The incident exposed how biometric automation remains dependent on human operators and contractors, and how breakdowns in backend governance can quickly negate front-end efficiency gains.

Despite these setbacks, DigiYatra continues to expand. The platform is operational at 24 airports, with another 17 in various stages of rollout. The Foundation is also introducing additional Indian languages to lower barriers to enrolment and use. “DigiYatra has started introducing Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu in beta mode to make enrolment and use easier for more people,” says Khadakbhavi.

The project’s ambitions now extend beyond domestic travel. DigiYatra is testing enrolment using e-passports that comply with International Civil Aviation Organization standards. 

The process involves scanning the first page of the passport, reading the machine readable zone and using NFC on the phone to read the electronic chip embedded in the passport. The chip stores both the machine readable data and the passport holder’s face.

“We take this face and then we want to validate whether it is the same person whose passport has been scanned,” Khandakbhavi explains. “We ask for a selfie, and then the selfie gets matched with the face that came from that e-chip. If the match is successful, then the credential gets created and stored.”

The immediate aim is to allow foreign nationals residing in India to use DigiYatra for domestic flights. The longer-term goal is to enable cross-border travel through shared digital credentials and automated immigration gates.

Khandakbhavi says the technical aspects are largely sorted.

“All the standards are very clear. What needs to be appreciated is the fact that border crossing is sensitive. We need authorities to be satisfied that it is safe and secure.”

This requires extensive coordination with Indian immigration authorities, foreign governments and global industry bodies like the International Air Transport Association (IATA). It is a slow diplomatic and regulatory process.

As the platform expands into cross-border use cases, unresolved questions about ownership and control have moved from the background to the foreground.

While the technology is advancing, the project’s legal foundations are under strain.

DigiYatra Foundation, a not-for-profit entity incorporated under Section 8 of the Companies Act, was created under the Ministry of Civil Aviation’s DigiYatra Policy, 2021. Its shareholders are airport operators, who fund the project’s implementation.

To build the platform, the Foundation selected Hyderabad-based Data Evolve Solutions Pvt. Ltd through a startup challenge facilitated by NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission in May 2021. The parties entered into a Master Vendor Agreement rather than a conventional tender.

That agreement is now at the center of a dispute before the Delhi High Court.

Data Evolve claims ownership over data and software developed during the partnership period and alleges that payments were withheld. DigiYatra Foundation disputes this, arguing that the agreement assigns all intellectual property rights, including future upgrades, to the Foundation.

In March 2024, the Delhi High Court granted an interim injunction restraining Data Evolve from using or transferring any DigiYatra passenger data and directed a complete handover of system access to the Foundation.

On October 29, 2025, a bench led by Justice Subramonium Prasad framed key issues for trial, including ownership of the DigiYatra platform, intellectual property rights, and alleged infringement by either party.

At a subsequent hearing in November, Data Evolve alleged that consultants from KPMG had unlawfully accessed and cloned the DigiYatra system, enabling deployment beyond what it says was contractually permitted. DigiYatra Foundation has denied the claim. The court has yet to rule on the allegation.

The case was listed for a further hearing on 10 December to address procedural and framing questions, including Data Evolve’s bid to expand the scope of issues under dispute, but no final ruling on ownership or intellectual property had been published as of mid-December.

As DigiYatra scales across airports and tests international use cases, the outcome of that legal battle may determine not just who controls the platform, but how India governs biometric systems that sit at the intersection of public infrastructure and private technology.

The precedent set here is likely to shape how future biometric systems in transport, public services and border control are designed, owned and governed in India.