'DigiYatra more valuable than Twitter Blue': Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma on blue tick subscription

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the Managing Director and CEO of Paytm, recently shared his positive experience using the DigiYatra facility at Delhi's T3 terminal. Sharma was highly impressed with the effectiveness of the biometric boarding system, which uses Facial Recognition Technology to provide passengers with a seamless and hassle-free experience at airports.

In a tweet, Sharma praised the DigiYatra facility, stating that he would be willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for it. He also compared the value of DigiYatra's perks to Twitter Blue, a similar subscription-based service launched by Twitter in India.

DigiYatra is an initiative launched by the Ministry of Civil Aviation to enhance the passenger experience by eliminating the need for verification of tickets and ID at multiple touchpoints. The main objective of the program is to achieve better throughput through existing infrastructure using a digital framework.

DigiYatra is a voluntary facility that does not store any central data of passengers' Personally Identifiable Information (PII). All the passenger data is encrypted and stored in the wallet of the passenger's smartphone, which is shared for a limited time duration with the airport of travel origin where the passenger's DigiYatra ID needs to be validated. The data is purged from the system within 24 hours of the flight. The facilities with the implementation of DigiYatra provide touchless passenger validation through FRT, which saves time at various touchpoints like entry to the airport, Security Hold Area (SHA), and Boarding Area with no CISF intervention.

Meanwhile, Twitter has removed the blue checks from accounts that don't pay a monthly fee to keep them. This move has affected thousands of verified users under the original blue-check system, including journalists, athletes, and public figures. The blue checks, which used to indicate that the account was verified by Twitter to be who it says it is, have been disappearing from many of the users' profiles.

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