tags:: [[!digiyatra]] [[equity]] [[technological determinism]] ## Content ### Hypotheses *(in descending order of confidence)* 1. DigiYatra's perceived efficiency is really an inequitable allocation problem. 2. Dedicated counters where CISF personnel manually glance at tickets and IDs instead of scanning barcodes and waiting for the details, and arbitrary conditions on who could use them will also result in significant 'efficiency' - all else being equal. 3. The barcode scans at gates introduced delays (compared to the manual method), which are compounded by the increasing footfalls as more people take up air travel. I have my biases, but I do wonder about the policy thinkers who are overly enthusiastic about DigiYatra's implementation from the 'simplicity', 'convenience', 'efficiency' perspective not asking what really should be very basic questions. I am not even getting into the surveillance aspect (which is the primary concern), but unfortunately gets dismissed as hypothetical/unlikely/corner-cases, etc. The underlying issue appears to be one of scale (as with most things). By their definition entry gates are meant to be choke points (they 'gate'). But the number of gates is, quite simply, not commensurate with the number of people entering airports. And yes, I get there are some challenges with indiscriminately increasing the number of gates. But here's how DigiYatra is being implemented currently. From the existing set of gates - which appear to be too few already, some are being "exclusively" set aside for DigiYatra. This only makes the problem worse for those who don't care about it / don't want to use it. Meanwhile, those who do use it, rave about how quickly they got in. But these time-savings are not based on efficiency, they are based on inequity and mismatched allocation. The percentage of gates assigned to Digiyatra, are not in consonance with the percentage of people that are actually using it. This should not be hard to validate - I assume many of the required data points are being gathered in the name of efficiency already. Here's a counter experiment - if the same number of queues are dedicated to manual checking - where the CISF personnel only glances at the ticket and identification documents instead of scanning the bar code - and set arbitrary conditions which mean only a tiny fraction of people can use them, would those people also 'save time'. My hypothesis is that they will. But, this perceived efficiency is enough to push more people into using it - which will in turn push airports to 'dedicate' more gates to DigiYatra -- at the expense of those who don't use it. These 'non-DigiYatra' queues will get longer and slower (feedback loop alert). Over time, there will be other burdens imposed on those not using DigiYatra, e.g. filling up forms, manual verification procedures not adequately staffed, <insert creative idea that I cannot think of right now>, etc. introducing further delays. Eventually, all (or all minus 1) gates will probably be DigiYatra - but the queues and delays will remain - because there is no such thing as zero-latency checkpoint. We'll still be in queues, just more surveilled. ## Related Notes ## Colophon %% title:: DigiYatra appears to be saving time because of inequity not efficiency type:: [[output]] url:: file:: creator:: Prateek Waghre %% created:: [[2023-03-05]] status:: [[bean]]