The Civil Aviation Ministry plans to roll out a project under which domestic passengers can link their Aadhaar to air tickets at the time of booking. This they say would allow passengers to travel to the airport without a valid ID card, as biometric verification will be done at the airport to confirm their identity. Making the boarding process paperless, passengers will, however, need to carry a mobile phone with their e-boarding card, which will then be scanned at security and at the boarding gate. This the Ministry claims will remove cases of fake tickets and help locate missing passengers at airports.
In June last year, the Minister of State for Civil Aviation, Jayant Sinha had launched a report on ‘DigiYatra’ and briefed the media about the ‘DigiYatra’ initiative of the Ministry. He claimed that the initiative will develop a digital ecosystem that will ensure a seamless, consistent and paperless service for the customers.
Under this initiative, the flyers’ biometrics will be checked and verified using infrastructure like retina scan, fingerprint scanners etc and the Aadhaar-linked airline database will show which flight they are to board and which parts of security and boarding procedure they have cleared and which ones are left, thus eliminating the need to show paper ID cards, paper tickets and boarding passes.
