Digi Yatra International Trials Explained: Seven Airports, E-Passports and Air India–IndiGo Flights From 1 November 2026
Key Takeaways
- Digi Yatra international trials go live on 1 November 2026 at Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Cochin, Mumbai, Chennai and Amritsar.
- Eligibility is limited to Indian nationals holding e-passports on Air India and select IndiGo international flights.
- Passengers create an e-passport-based credential in the Digi Yatra app and store it in the wallet on their own device.
- Digi Yatra does not replace passports, airline document checks or immigration procedures.
- The trials run through December 2026, and feedback will inform a wider rollout in 2027.
From 1 November 2026, Digi Yatra — the facial-recognition based airport entry system that domestic flyers in India already use — will begin trials for international passengers at seven Indian airports. The trials will be open to eligible Indian nationals who hold e-passports and are travelling on international flights operated by Air India and IndiGo. The announcement, reported by The Hindu BusinessLine, Express Computer and Travel Trade Journal on the basis of information from the Digi Yatra Foundation, marks the first time the platform moves beyond domestic travel.
The beta programme is already underway, and the trials are scheduled to go live on 1 November and run through December 2026. Passenger feedback collected during this period will inform plans for a wider rollout in 2027. That trial framing matters: this is not yet a nationwide launch for all international travellers, and not every airport, airline or route is covered.
What is changing on 1 November
The international passenger trials will run at seven airports: Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Cochin, Mumbai, Chennai and Amritsar. At these airports, eligible passengers will be able to use Digi Yatra at enabled touchpoints, including terminal entry, the Security Hold Area and boarding gates, subject to infrastructure availability at each location.
Coverage differs by airline. The trials cover all international destinations served by Air India and select destinations operated by IndiGo. So two passengers departing from the same airport on the same day may have different experiences: one may be able to use the Digi Yatra lanes, while the other may have to use the regular process because their airline or destination is not part of the trial. Travellers should therefore check, before they reach the airport, whether their specific flight is covered, rather than assuming that Digi Yatra at the airport automatically means Digi Yatra for their flight.
Who can use the international trials
Eligibility is deliberately narrow for this phase. The trials are for Indian nationals who hold e-passports — the newer passports with an embedded electronic chip — and who are travelling on international flights operated by Air India or IndiGo within the trial's coverage.
Holding an ordinary, non-chip passport does not qualify for this phase, and neither does travelling on another airline's international flight, even from one of the seven trial airports. Foreign nationals are also outside the trial's stated eligibility. These limits are typical of a controlled trial: a smaller, well-defined group makes it easier to test the system, spot problems and fix them before a wider rollout.
How the e-passport credential works
The process centres on a digital credential, called a Verifiable Credential, created through the Digi Yatra app. According to the Digi Yatra Foundation's description of the programme, an eligible passenger scans the Machine Readable Zone of the e-passport, reads the data stored in its embedded chip using a compatible smartphone's Near Field Communication capability, captures a selfie and verifies the details. Once created, the credential is stored in the passenger's Digi Yatra wallet on their own device.
At the airport, the passenger's face is then used to verify their identity at enabled touchpoints, instead of repeatedly showing physical documents at each checkpoint. This is the same basic idea as the domestic system: link a verified facial image to the journey, then let cameras at e-gates confirm that the person passing through is the same person. The difference for international travel is the source of the identity data — the e-passport chip rather than the Aadhaar-based registration used for domestic Digi Yatra enrolment.
One important limit remains unchanged. Passengers must still carry their travel documents and complete mandatory airline document checks, immigration procedures and other travel formalities as usual. Digi Yatra speeds up the airport's own processing steps; it does not replace immigration control, visa checks or the airline's responsibility to verify that a passenger is properly documented for their destination. Anyone who arrives assuming they can leave their passport at home will be disappointed — and could miss their flight.
Where Digi Yatra comes from
Digi Yatra was launched on 1 December 2022 at three airports — Delhi, Varanasi and Bengaluru — as a paperless, contactless passenger processing system based on facial recognition technology. The idea, as described by the Ministry of Civil Aviation at launch, was that a traveller should be able to pass through airport checkpoints using facial features to establish identity, linked to the boarding pass, instead of producing an identity card and boarding pass at every stage.
The project is run by the Digi Yatra Foundation, a joint-venture company whose shareholders include the Airports Authority of India, which holds 26 per cent, and the operators of the Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Cochin airports. From its three-airport start, the domestic system expanded to other major airports over the following years, which is why many regular domestic flyers already have the app on their phones. The international trial is the next step: taking a system proven on domestic routes and testing whether it works for the more complex world of international departures, where passport data, airline systems and destination rules all come into play.
Why privacy is part of the story
Facial recognition at airports always raises a privacy question, and Digi Yatra's design has been presented as an answer to it. At the 2022 launch, the Civil Aviation Ministry said there would be no central storage of personally identifiable information, that a passenger's identity and travel credentials would be stored in a secure wallet on the passenger's own smartphone, and that data uploaded for a journey would be purged from servers within 24 hours of use.
The international trial follows the same decentralised pattern: the e-passport-based credential lives in the wallet on the passenger's device, not in a single central database of faces. That design does not end the privacy debate — questions about how long cameras retain images, who can access them, and what happens when something goes wrong will keep being asked, and the trial period is exactly when such questions should be tested. But it does explain why Digi Yatra is described as a self-sovereign identity system: the passenger holds their own credential and presents it, rather than the airport holding a copy of everyone's face.
What the trials could change for passengers
If the trials work as intended, the most visible benefit will be shorter, smoother queues at the busiest pinch points of an international departure: getting into the terminal, clearing the security hold area and boarding the aircraft. International departures involve more document checks than domestic ones, so even small time savings at each checkpoint can add up, especially at peak hours in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.
For airlines and airports, the benefit is throughput: processing more passengers through the same gates and the same terminal space without building new infrastructure. That matters because India's international traffic has been growing, and the busiest airports are already crowded at peak times. A system that moves verified passengers faster through fixed infrastructure is cheaper and quicker than expanding terminals.
There are also risks to watch during the trial. Facial recognition can fail in poor light, with changed appearances, or for passengers whose phones lack NFC or whose e-passport chips cannot be read. Infrastructure will not be identical at all seven airports, so the experience may be smooth at one airport and patchy at another. And because the trial covers only some airlines and destinations, confusion is likely: passengers may join a Digi Yatra lane only to find their flight is not covered. How the Foundation and the airlines communicate these limits — at booking, at check-in and at the airport — will matter as much as the technology itself.
What happens after December
The trial runs through December 2026, and the Digi Yatra Foundation has said passenger feedback will inform plans for a wider rollout in 2027. That leaves several questions open. Will the rollout extend to more airports, more airlines and foreign nationals? Will the credential eventually work for arrivals as well as departures? And will the system be made interoperable with other countries' digital travel credentials, so that an Indian traveller's Digi Yatra credential is recognised abroad?
None of those outcomes is decided yet, and travellers should treat any claim that Digi Yatra will soon be available on every international flight as speculation. The honest position, as of the trial announcement, is narrower: seven airports, two airlines, Indian e-passport holders, November to December 2026, with a decision on wider rollout to follow.
Conclusion
The Digi Yatra international trials are a careful, limited experiment with a potentially large payoff. For eligible Indian e-passport holders flying Air India or IndiGo from Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Cochin, Mumbai, Chennai or Amritsar, November and December 2026 will offer a first taste of paperless international departures. For everyone else, the trials are still worth watching: if they work, the same face-based processing that changed domestic travel could, over time, change how India handles international departures too. The key advice for now is simple — check whether your flight is covered, set up the credential before you travel, and carry your passport anyway.