Almost paperless at the airport in Calcutta
OUR TAXI PULLED up outside the departure section of Calcutta’s huge airport terminal on the 20th of January 2024. We were dismayed to see the extremely long lines of people waiting with trolleys laden with assorted baggage. They were all waiting to pass through the police security check points to enter the terminal.
We soon realised that even if we were to have been at the head of one of these queues, we would not have been able to pass through the checkpoint without having first registered with DijiYatra.
If you have not flown from an Indian airport recently, you will be as puzzled as we were. DijiYatra is an electronic system depending on AI facial recognition to allow passengers to pass the various checkpoints on their way to the ‘plane without having to keep on showing paper documents at each point.
An app exists for DijiYatra, but we did not have this on our telephones. Looking perplexed, an airport official working for our airline, Indigo, led us to some electronic terminals. A man standing by it entered our PNR code, and took pictures of our faces. Following thus we were each handed small flimsy squares of paper bearing our names, flight details and a QR code. We were directed to a policeman standing nearby.
The policeman scanned our DijiYatra paper slips and checked our passports against the faces now recorded in the system. After this, we were sent to one of the checkpoints next to the entrance to the terminal. There was only one person in front of us. After having our small paper slips and our faces scanned, gates opened and we could proceed to the baggage drop-off counters.
At another checkpoint at the entrance to the security checking area, we scanned our DijiYatra slips once again. When the system matched the slip to a scan of our faces, we proceeded into the security control area.
The idea behind DijiYatra is to reduce the use of paper checking and to replace it by facial recognition systems. All well and good, but in our experience the system did rely on keeping two easy-to-lose tiny bits of paper. I guess that had we downloaded the app, the paper slips would not have been required.
What puzzled me were the long queues. Everyone in them had registered for DijiYatra.
