How DIGIPIN became a reality with IIT-Hyderabad, NRSC and India Post collaboration

DIGIPIN, developed by IIT-H with the Department of Posts and NRSC, introduces a standardised geospatial digital address system for India, enabling offline use and precision for logistics, e-commerce, and governance

Sangareddy: DIGIPIN, the open-source, machine-interpretable geospatial addressing system designed to provide precise and standardised digital addresses across the country, is a product of the combined efforts of the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT-H), in collaboration with the Department of Posts and the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC).

In an official statement, the developers of the system said traditional descriptive addresses in India suffer from lack of uniformity and machine-readability, causing inefficiencies in postal and logistics operations. DIGIPIN aims to transform this by introducing a geo-coded, digital public infrastructure (DPI) layer for India’s physical addressing landscape. It is a compact, intuitive, and human-readable geohash capable of encoding the latitude and longitude of any point of interest in India, from urban households to remote maritime locations.

The system is designed for offline usability, privacy, and robustness, making it suitable for diverse applications including e-commerce, emergency response, and public service delivery.

DIGIPIN is the outcome of a dedicated research effort by a team of faculty from the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT-H — Dr Shashank Vatedka, Prof Soumya Jana and Dr Lakshmi Prasad Natarajan — along with Tarandeep Singh, a former MTech (AI) student. Their work has produced a geohashing scheme that encapsulates geographic coordinates into short, intuitive codes, which can be extracted even offline using location-enabled devices.

IIT-H Director Prof BS Murty said DIGIPIN represents a leap towards the vision of a digitally empowered India. By converting every location into a simple, verifiable, and interoperable digital code, they are laying the foundation for an address infrastructure that can scale with the nation’s growing technological and societal needs.