The man who wants your face to be the boarding pass—everywhere

The pilot project, done in partnership with Jet Airways, which was still operational back then, went smoothly. But it was much harder to pull off, than it seemed.

“Back then, everything was manual,” recalls Suresh Khadakbhavi, now chief executive officer (CEO) of the Digi Yatra Foundation. “We realized that identity and travel document validations were done by different systems, and we could unify them digitally.”

Working with a few manufacturers, his team prototyped a system that validated Aadhaar biometrics alongside the travel ticket. Khadakbhavi remembers walking with the passengers from the entry gate all the way to the boarding gate, capturing their reactions on video.

One lady asked him: “Why just one airline, one lane? Why not the whole airport?”

“That’s when it hit us—this had national potential,” he says.

It would be another five years before India formally brought the idea to life with DigiYatra, a system that promises seamless check-in to boarding experience for flyers. Today, it has more than 15 million users and has enabled over 60 million verified journeys. On average, 125,000 passengers use it every day, accounting for 30–35% of domestic flyers. The service is currently live at 24 airports. Another 17 are in the pipeline.

The architect

The project began as a whiteboard exercise in Bengaluru sometime in 2015. Khadakbhavi was then a deputy general manager at the Bengaluru International Airport Ltd’s information technology department. He joined an internal workshop about the airport’s preparedness to design Terminal 2.

“All participants were asked to imagine the ideal passenger experience,” he recalls.

Khadakbhavi envisioned a traveller gliding through check-in, security, and boarding without ever showing a document—face as the only credential. Everything else happens digitally, in the background. He titled his proposal: ‘My face is my boarding pass’.

Dozens of submissions were pinned on a wall and put to a vote. “Mine got just seven votes,” he laughs. “But I wasn’t discouraged.”

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He started reaching out to biometric vendors to build an end-to-end system. It wasn’t easy. Biometrics in airports were still new. The system had to go beyond identity and validate travel documents, coordinate with airlines and security, and meet compliance at every step.

Even in 2017, “we were just volunteers”, recalls Khadakbhavi. Hence, to make the project work across the country, and introduce facial recognition, he would need the cooperation of other stakeholders, including the ministry of civil aviation, the Central Industrial Security Force, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), and intelligence agencies.

Encouraged by the initial passenger feedback, the team reached out to the civil aviation ministry. Then minister of state, Jayant Sinha, was enthusiastic. “He understood immediately that this could make airport experiences less painful,” recalls Khadakbhavi.

A series of live demos convinced the ministry to back the idea formally. By August 2018, the DigiYatra policy was officially released. While airports had already been experimenting with pilot trials, this was the first attempt at a formal framework. The ministry formed a digital cell to guide the process, headed by then secretary R.N. Choubey. Chief executives of public-private partnership airports—Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Cochin, and Mumbai—joined the steering committee. Technical experts from these airports, including Khadakbhavi himself, formed the working committee.

To validate the policy design, they looped in Aadhaar architects Nandan Nilekani and Pramod Varma.

Nilekani suggested a not-for-profit structure for the organization. That way, the focus remains on the mission, not monetization.

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By February 2019, the Digi Yatra Foundation was officially registered as a Section 8 not-for-profit. The Airports Authority of India, and the international airports from Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Cochin, are its shareholders.

For now, the foundation’s funding comes from a simple model: each subscribing airport pays a fee based on passenger volumes. Costs are distributed proportionally.

Covid pause

Just when things were running smoothly, the covid-19 pandemic hit and everything froze. “Travel collapsed. Airports—our shareholders—were focused on surviving. But ironically, the pandemic made our case stronger. DigiYatra is contactless by default. No touching devices, no exchanging documents,” says Khadakbhavi.

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During this period, he joined the International Air Transport Association (IATA) One ID advisory group, where global discussions were underway to build seamless, secure passenger experiences. “That’s when self-sovereign identity (SSI) came into the picture,” he says.

Unlike centralized systems, where data is stored on servers, SSI allows identity credentials to be stored directly on users’ phones, making it ideal for decentralized applications such as DigiYatra.

“When we asked UIDAI if we could ping Aadhaar every time a passenger boarded, they said no—it would overload their systems and raise privacy risks,” recalls Khadakbhavi. “So we proposed a one-time Aadhaar validation to create a reusable credential stored on the passenger’s phone. They agreed.”

To build this, the foundation ran a startup challenge in partnership with NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission. Over 400 startups expressed interest. Two were selected to begin the implementation. One of them stepped back, citing limited blockchain expertise. The other, DataEvolve, built the platform that would become DigiYatra’s core.

A soft launch took place on 15 August 2022. By 1 December, DigiYatra formally went live at three airports: Delhi, Bengaluru, and Varanasi. In the months following the launch, adoption surged.

“We soon realized we needed a proper organization, not just volunteers,” Khadakbhavi explains.

The board began searching for a full-time leader. “I threw my hat in the ring,” he says. On 1 April, 2023, he was officially appointed CEO.

‘Don’t KYC’

Soon, DigiYatra ran into controversies.

Concerns were raised over the aggressive and opaque manner in which the system was being pushed at airports, especially since India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, is yet to be enforced. The draft rules were notified this January.

That the Digi Yatra Foundation is not governed by the country’s Right to Information (RTI) Act has only increased the unease.

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The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital rights advocacy organization, acknowledges that DigiYatra is “an opt-in and completely voluntary service at Indian airports”. Nonetheless, it cautions that digital processing using facial recognition technology and personal credentials to authenticate users instead of traditional boarding passes is being done “with inadequate privacy safeguards, in a non-transparent data ecosystem, and sometimes without your consent, making it a challenge for you to navigate airports without enrolling in the service”.

IFF has written multiple letters to Indian authorities, including the civil aviation ministry, NITI Aayog, Digi Yatra Foundation, and the Airports Authority of India, underscoring that the foundation has a 26% shareholding from the union government, but is not covered under the RTI Act and does not disclose its cyber security audits.

Last July, the India unit of the Software Freedom Law Centre, a legal services organization, too, highlighted reports of passengers “either being forced into or unknowingly enrolled in DigiYatra”.

Vibhav Mithal, an associate partner at law firm Anand and Anand, notes that while Digi Yatra has stated repeatedly that it is voluntary in nature, consent of the end-user to use the system becomes critical, and travellers must know it’s a choice.

“Being a private entity, the DPDP law, once in force, would apply. Further, as it is an AI (artificial intelligence) facial recognition technology, risk mitigation beyond aspects of data protection are equally relevant—such as mitigating the risk of bias,” says Mithal.

The Internet Freedom Foundation cautions that digital processing using facial recognition technology and personal credentials to authenticate users is being done “with inadequate privacy safeguards”.

Khadakbhavi acknowledges that clearing concerns around privacy and introducing more languages (other than English) will help unlock even wider adoption.

“It’s a fair concern. Unless we communicate clearly and creatively, the doubt will linger,” he admits.“We don’t know your age, gender, airline, or how often you fly,” Khadakbhavi stresses. “And that’s by design.”

This privacy-first approach powers DigiYatra’s “Don’t Know Your Customer” campaign—a witty reversal of traditional KYC. The Foundation has also begun conducting regular audits across its Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based cloud, app, and airport verifiers.

“All data shared with airports is purged within 24 hours of departure. But we’re going further—we’ll soon start notifying users when their data is purged.”

What users think

Kashyap Kompella, an AI analyst and founder of tech consultancy RPA2AI, is a frequent flier. It typically takes him an hour to reach Bengaluru airport but last week, it took him much longer because of traffic. “I would have missed my flight had it not been for the shorter DigiYatra queue,” he says with a sense of relief.

Kompella initially did not use DigiYatra because he wanted to minimize his digital footprint. “I deleted the app after reports of data breach (in 2023). I installed it again because the non-DigiYatra security lanes take longer,” he says. Kompella does worry about privacy, but like everyone else, he’s trading privacy for a bit of convenience, he adds.

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DigiYatra has also become an integral part of the flying routine of Moksh Juneja, founder and CEO of Mumbai-based digital agency Avignyata Inc. Juneja is a frequent business traveler, mostly to Delhi and Bengaluru. “It saves time and adds predictability to the airport experience,” he says.

As a family traveller, though, Juneja believes DigiYatra has a gap. “Since our kids are under 10, we’ve consciously given them basic feature phones, which means they can’t access the app. This forces us to use the regular lines while travelling as a family, which slows things down,” he adds.

Not just in English

“We’re a lean team—fewer than 20 people, including outsourced app and backend developers. But we’re nimble,” says Khadakbhavi. He adds that airports have played a crucial role in adoption. Many deployed “DigiBuddies”—contract staff who walk around terminal areas, helping passengers enroll. “They explain how this process saves time. And it works,” he points out.

The next frontier, like the CEO mentioned earlier, is expanding the languages DigiYatra supports. Today, six Indian languages are already tested, with plans to roll out 22. Language translations are being done in partnership with AI4Bharat’s Bhashini system. “Eventually, we want to support global languages, too,” he says.

Easy border control?

As the system matures, DigiYatra is increasingly fielding inquiries from foreign governments. “They’ve experienced it in India and want us to build similar systems,” says Khadakbhavi.

The foundation now aims to make Digi Yatra a digital public infrastructure asset, like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). “It will take six to nine months, but we’re on track.”

How does Digi Yatra compare with global systems such as Singapore’s automated gates or Clear, a biometric identity platform, in the US?

“They’re centralized. The data goes into sovereign databases,” says Khadakbhavi. “We’re different. Your credentials stay on your phone.”

But could DigiYatra eventually enable international travel?

Absolutely, he says. With India now issuing International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)-compliant e-passports, passengers can scan and create a digital credential with near-field communication, a short-range wireless technology that allows data exchange between devices.

“You could share this (the digital credential) with both your departure and destination airports. So, if you fly from Bengaluru to Paris, your credentials could help you breeze through border control at both ends,” says Khadakbhavi.

The CEO’s next vision? One day, this system could extend beyond aviation—into hotel check-ins, IT parks, even online exams.

He hopes that what started with ‘My face is my boarding pass’, will eventually become, “My face is my identity—everywhere.”