The Travel Facilitator: Suresh Khadakbhavi, CEO, DigiYatra Under his leadership, the organisation has achieved six million people who have downloaded the app

In an era defined by rapid technological evolution, Suresh Khadakbhavi emerged as a beacon of digital transformation in the travel industry. As a digital transformation and innovation architect, he has been at the forefront of implementing groundbreaking initiatives across India, most notably with DigiYatra—a biometric passenger processing system that adheres to W3C standards and embraces Self Sovereign Identity principles. This pioneering project is not just changing how passengers travel; it's redefining the entire travel experience.

When Suresh Khadakbhavi took over as CEO, DigiYatra was operational at only three airports— Bangalore, Varanasi, and Delhi. Today, it has expanded to 24 airports, with five more soon to join. However, this progress didn't come without challenges. "We had to build a life funding pipeline," Khadakbhavi said, referring to the critical task of ensuring financial support. For passengers, the concept was new, raising concerns about how to install and use the app and the security of their personal information. Managing passenger flow at biometric boarding gates was another hurdle. "Unstructured flow at the e-gates can lead to multiple faces being presented at once, creating a challenge for the system to validate documents," Khadakbhavi explained. Over time, airports have introduced a structured process, where passengers wait at a designated point before proceeding to the e-gate. "Now, we have a systematic, methodical flow at every touchpoint," he said.

While sharing how self-sovereign identity works, Khadakbhavi explained, "Self-sovereign identity means you are in control of your data." Passenger's credentials, verified against their Aadhaar information, are stored on their phones—not on DigiYatra's servers. "We consciously decided not to store any personally identifiable information," he said, emphasizing a privacy-by-design approach.

This decentralized model makes large-scale data breaches almost impossible. "Imagine if I had a database of 5 million users. One hack could expose all that data. But with DigiYatra, every passenger's data is on their phone. To hack five million phones is five million times more difficult than hacking one database," Khadakbhavi pointed out.

Under his leadership, the organisation has achieved six million people who have downloaded the app.

Now he aims to enhance the user experience with features, such as e- passport-based enrollment and plans to integrate with international airports for a seamless travel. experience.