Hyderabad: About a decade ago, locating a house or a shop based on the postal address required attributes like city, locality, street name or number or lane number and house number or shop number. Yet finding the desired house or shop would not be successful without taking guidance from people in the neighbourhood.
While Google Maps or WhatsApp location resolved the issue in instances where the person is in direct touch with the addressee, people continued to find it difficult to locate the address merely based on the offline postal coordinates.
This issue, however, was resolved, thanks to a new initiative called Digipin, which is a result of a collaboration between the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Hyderabad, the department of posts, and Isro’s National Remote Sensing Centre.
Digipin — an abbreviation of the Digital Postal Index — is a 10-character alphanumeric code which contains the location’s latitude and longitude coordinates. This code allows the user to identify even the smallest location like a 4mx4m (13 feet X 13 feet) room, with the help of the Digipin search module at https://dac.indiapost.gov.in/mydigipin/home.
The IndiaPost portal also allows the user to convert the DIGIPIN into a scannable QR code.
Digipin was developed by a team of researchers from the Department of Electrical Engineering at IITH. The team includes Dr Shashank Vatedka, Prof. Soumya Jana and Dr Lakshmi Prasad Natarajan, along with Tarandeep Singh, a former MTech (AI) student.
Dr Vatedka, who led the team, called it “a convenience to Indian residents and all stakeholders by succinctly and precisely representing a physical address.” He added that the format allows codes to be “easily stored and communicated using digital wallets.”
“This represents a leap towards the vision of a digitally empowered India,” said Prof B.S. Murty, director of IIT Hyderabad. “By converting every location into a simple, verifiable, and interoperable digital code, we are laying the foundation for an address infrastructure that can scale with our nation’s growing technological and societal needs.”
As the Digipin project is based on open-source code, several private players have developed mobile apps for Android. Except for IndiaPost’s Digipin portal, the private mobile apps face interoperability with Google Maps. The interoperability between Digipin portal and Google Maps and Mappls was seamless. A simple click on the small QR code icon under your Digipin Code was enough to take you either to Google Maps or Mappls.
A barcode or QR version can be printed on packages or used via digital wallets. The system is already being seen as a way to support India’s digital public infrastructure. The geocoding system can be used to assign addresses even where formal ones are missing. From health camps to Aadhaar centres, Digipin can help service providers find people instead of the other way round.
Since the project is in its infancy, it does not yet have a high-quality mobile app. Once it happens, the address space on your envelope will shrink to just lines — the name of the addressee and the Digipin.
