The Man Cleaning Up Our Airport Check-In Mess

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

- Leslie D'Monte leslie.d@livemint.​com BENGALURU

On a foggy January morning in 2017,17 passengers voluntarily stepped into an experimental lane at Bengaluru's Kempegowda International Airport to test a new way of boarding flights: no identity (ID) card, no ticket, no boarding pass. A simple scanner cross-verified the passengers' fingerprints with India's unique identity system, Aadhaar, and matched them against the flight manifest.

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 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.