The Man Cleaning Up Our Airport Check-In Mess

Suresh Khadakbhavi, CEO of the Digi Yatra Foundation, now wants to take his system global

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The DigiYatra project began as a whiteboard exercise in 2015. Suresh Khadakbhavi titled his proposal: 'My face is my boarding pass'.

The structure for the organization. That way, focus remains on the mission, not monetization.

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 in 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.

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 work stronger. DigiYatra is contactless by default. No touching devices, no exchanging documents," says Khadakbhavi.

During this period, he joined the International Air Transport Association (IATA) 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 systems.

"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."