mumbai its neither delhi nor bengaluru the largest percentage of passengers who use the biometricsenabled digiyatra app for seamless access through checkpoints at airport terminals are in varanasi followed by vijayawada in the past week 76 of passengers from varanasi airport used digiyatra shows data collected by civil aviation ministry for vijayawada airport that figure was 62 compare that to delhi and bengaluru where the users made up for only 19 and 14 respectivelydigiyatra uses facial biometric verification technology to allow passengers access into the airport terminal clear security and board aircraft it does away with the conventional methods which involve manual verification of air tickets and identity cards to move through an airportthough delhi and bengaluru had a comparatively fewer percentage of digi users it should be noted that the base for these metro airports are much higher in delhi 648 lakh passengers have used the app in the past six months while for bengaluru the number was 5 lakh in comparison only 225 lakh passengers used the app in varanasi while in vijayawada it was about 47000 digiyatra was launched by the government on december 1 last year with bengaluru and varanasi airports in phase1apart from these four airports digiyatra is available at kolkata pune and hyderabad airports mumbai airport is expected to get the facility soon up until june 20 over 17 lakh passengers have used the appin the digiyatra process there is no central storage of passengers personally identifiable information pii data all passenger data is encrypted and stored in the wallet of the passengers smartphone and shared only for a limited time duration with the airport of travel origin where the passengers digiyatra id needs to be validated said the ministry of civil aviationthe data is purged from the system within 24 hours of the flight the data is shared by passengers directly only when they travel and only with the origin airport the data cannot be used by any other entity since its encrypted and cannot be shared with any stakeholders it added