5 airport entrances reserved for DigiYatra flyers, only 1 for others
Times of India | 10 January 2024
Kolkata: Around 13,000-15,000 flyers boarding flights from Kolkata have only one gate to enter the terminal, leading to massive queues at the entrance during rush hours. The remaining five gates are used by an equal number of passengers who use the paperless, facial recognition DigiYatra service to access the airport.
Several travellers who don’t use DigiYatra are elderly citizens or first-time flyers or those without smartphones.But there are also some passengers who are not comfortable sharing their details on a public platform. They all feel they are being penalised for being technologically handicapped or opting out of the facial-recognition system.
Since the end of last month, airport authorities have converted five entry gates — 1A, 2A, 2B, 3A and 3B — into dedicated DigiYatra gates. The only gate allotted for non-DigiYatra registered passengers is gate 1B.
On Monday, 25,632 had departed from Kolkata, out of which 12,219 used DigiYatra. It means 13,413 passengers had to use the manual gate 1B and had to stand in long queues at multiple times of the day.
“I am not comfortable sharing my photo ID on a third-party platform and thus, I didn’t register myself with the service. I preferred travelling the usual way where CISF personnel manually check my ID and boarding pass. When I reached the airport, I was asked to either register to the service taking help from some DigiYatra volunteers or queue up at the sole manual gate. There was a long queue and it took me 20 minutes to enter the airport,” said Dwaipayan Roy, who was travelling to Delhi on Monday.
Many have even started taking on social media to share their angst. “I was forced to use DigiYatra at Kolkata airport,” posted a user with handle @baikunth on X on Sunday. Another user, Agnivo Niyogi, posted: “At Kolkata airport, the security staff deliberately create a bottleneck at entrance (by taking long time to check IDs) and airport staff then make passengers opt for DigiYatra to ‘save time’.”
“We are only following the Centre’s direction to promote DigiYatra and are thus increasing the number of Digiyatra gates at the airport. However, in case of glitches or any other trouble, including congestion and long queues at the non-DigiYatra gates, provision has been kept so that the same DigiYatra gates can be used for manual entry of passengers,” said a senior airport official.
The official added 20% of domestic passengers currently come with their details uploaded on DigiYatra and experience seamless check-in. “We have to guide the others with help of volunteers so that they can use register and use DigiYatra at the airport. But we never force anyone. It is an optional service,” said the official, who added that a majoriy of airlines have also enrolled into the service now, leading to more passengers using the facility as well.
DigiYatra allows paperless transit and enables flyers to skip queues at the entry and security check. The facility was launched on March 31 at the Kolkata airport. In April, only 5% of flyers were using the service and in June, it had climbed only to 11%. But since September, more than 35% of passengers on an average and by December, close to 50% passengers are using the facility. “A flyer who has downloaded the app takes less than 10-12 seconds to enter the terminal and even less to reach the frisking point at security check,” said another official.