A deep dive into the tech, governance, and everyday friction of modern air travel with the person who helped turn a fringe idea into India’s biometric travel backbone. Suresh Khadakbhavi walks us from a muddy auto ride before his BIAL interview to the pilot with Jet Airways that proved passenger-first biometrics could scale nationally and explains how Digi Yatra is designed to enable seamless journeys without becoming a surveillance system.
What you’ll hear in this episode
• A vivid origin story of how aviation and Suresh found each other, including a memorable muddy-ride interview anecdote that ended with an emergency wardrobe buy.
• The spark inside BIAL’s Innovation Lab that birthed the “walk-through-all-touchpoints-with-no-one-stopping-you” idea and how rapid passenger feedback at BLR turned a developer’s dream into a national program.
• How the 2017 Jet Airways pilot validated core assumptions, which insights convinced stakeholders to scale, and the unexpected operational learnings from working with airlines.
• A clear, technical separation between Digi Yatra’s decentralized self‑sovereign identity model and centralized surveillance systems, plus exactly what data touches external servers during a Digi Yatra transaction.
• The governance and technical design choices made to prevent mission creep and ensure passenger privacy.
• Practical reasons why adoption feels voluntary yet operationally nudged, and how airports balance efficiency with genuine choice.
• Measurable operational wins, including reduced processing times at entry gates and the downstream economics that happier, faster passengers bring to airports and retail.
• The role of partner integrations—airlines, OTAs, and apps—in making Digi Yatra the travel stack for India and the roadmap to gate-level boarding automation.
• International ambitions, collaboration with IATA’s One‑ID work, and the vision for Digi Yatra to interoperate with EU credentials and other global systems for borderless travel.
• Near-term product roadmap highlights: AI-driven multilingual chatbots, anti-spoofing measures, expanded onboarding flows, and pilots beyond airports into hotels and other travel touchpoints.
Vishal Mehra - @vishal1mehra