Facial recognition system planned at Delhi, Pune, other airports by Mar 2023: Govt

Facial recognition system is planned at Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata, Varanasi and Vijayawada airports by March 2023, the government told the Parliament on Monday.
 
Facial recognition is a part of the government's ‘Digi Yatra’ initiative aimed at providing passengers with a seamless experience at airports, Minister of State for Civil Aviation General VK Singh told the Lok Sabha.

The preliminary testing of these systems along with registration for the ‘Day of Travel’ has been completed at the aforementioned airports, he said, and noted that the security requirement is dynamic in nature.

He added that the civil aviation security regulator -- Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) -- reviews the security arrangements at airports form time to time and upgrades the same as per requirement in consultation with other agencies and stakeholders.
 
"The Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem envisages assessments (by independent teams to assess the level of security and system resilience to protect PII) and periodic audits by governing or regulatory bodies twice every year," Singh had explained in the previous Parliament session in December last year.

The facial recognition system is as per industry ISO standards with the best-in-class National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) listed algorithms complying with data privacy and data protection requirement as laid down by the government.
 
Singh had also underscored that people who do not want to avail this will have an option to not send in data and use the existing manual process at airports.

Data shared by the passengers will be used for the purpose defined and won’t be shared with any other external shareholders. This data will not be retained during their transit at airport and will not be retained for more than 24 hours after departure.