Kolkata: DigiYatra — a technology meant to help passengers pass through airport entry gates swiftly— is turning into a fresh source of frustration for some flyers at Kolkata airport after glitches.From QR codes that refuse to scan to doubts over facial recognition and queues building up when kiosks fail, passengers have flagged problems with DigiYatra on Tuesday and Wednesday, leading to overcrowding at the entry gates.Airport officials, however, said the disruption was brief and had been contained. “It was not an extended outage. A technical snag occurred which lasted approximately 30 to 45 minutes, and our technical teams rectified it immediately,” a Kolkata airport official stated. “Periodic maintenance and occasional system recalibrations can sometimes lead to intermittent issues, but operations were restored swiftly,” he added. Another senior airport official said the system encountered a sharp disruption due to an unexpected telecom network failure.“There was an outage on one of these days when the telecom network went completely down. We proactively informed passengers that services were temporarily halted while maintenance teams intervened. The operational snags have since been addressed,” the official clarified. Beyond the isolated glitch, the official addressed growing feedback from frequent flyers, demanding that Kolkata should match up to the standard gate procedures used at privately-operated hubs like in Delhi and Mumbai, where entry is completed using facial recognition solely, without rescanning a digital boarding pass or QR code. “Why DigiYatra never works at Kolkata airport,” passenger Harold Finch asked on social media, flagging problems with the system.He said CISF personnel advised passengers to keep their phone-screen brightness high while generating or displaying QR codes, adding that face recognition remained “light years away” in his experience. Another passenger, Sujit Goswami, complained that the DigiYatra kiosks at Gates 1 and 2 failed to scan QR codes when he visited the airport. He alleged that no steps were taken to resolve the problem, resulting in congestion at the entry points.“Had a really bad experience at Kolkata Airport today, with DigiYatra entry points not working. At gates 1 and 2, kiosks were unable to scan DigiYatra QR and no actions were taken to resolve the issue, causing overcrowding at entry,” he wrote on X. At AAI-run airports the entry gates operate on a two-step validation model requiring both a QR code scan and a biometric facial match.“The dual requirement is an added layer of operational security,” the official explained. “While flyers argue that removing the QR scan saves valuable seconds, bypassing it requires changes across AAI network,” he added.
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