What are the issues with the Digi Yatra app? | In Focus podcast

In this episode, Prateek Waghre and Disha Verma speak to us about whether the Digi Yatra app is actually safe and reliable, and if it should be withdrawn.

In the past few weeks, there has been a surge of complaints from passengers about Digiyatra. Their main complaint is about security personnel and airport staff collecting their biometrics for the app, using coercion and deception.

According to travellers, CISF personnel at the entry gates were asking them to scan their boarding pass and capturing their photos, and then enrolling them in the Digi Yatra app without even informing them. The element of coercion is especially startling as the Ministry of Civil Aviation, when it unveiled the Digi Yaytra policy in 2018, had made it clear that it would be entirely voluntary.

Digital rights experts have highlighted several other concerns about the Digi Yatra app, related to privacy, surveillance, exclusion, lack of transparency and accountability, and violation of the passenger’s dignity and autonomy. The Ministry, on its part, has said that the only objective of the Digi Yatra’s biometrics-enabled, digital processing of passengers is to usher in “paper-less and seamless movement through various checkpoints” at airports.

Is the Digi Yatra app safe? Is it reliable? How do airports in other countries process passengers? And is Digi Yatra really worth it or should it be withdrawn?

Guests: Prateek Waghre, Executive Director, Internet Freedom Foundation, and

Disha Verma, Associate Policy Counsel, Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF).

Host: G. Sampath, Social Affairs Editor, The Hindu.