IIT Hyderabad, Department of Posts, and NRSC (ISRO) Collaborate to Launch DIGIPIN: A National-Scale Geospatial Addressing System for India

• Compactness: Short and efficient codes for ease of use.
• Geographic Precision: Ability to extract exact latitude and longitude coordinates.
• Inclusivity: Coverage for all parts of India, including densely populated and remote regions.
• Privacy: DIGIPIN carries no personal information.
• Future-readiness: Scalable and adaptable for future needs.

In a landmark move to revolutionize India’s addressing infrastructure, the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH), in collaboration with the Department of Posts and the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), ISRO, Government of India, has developed DIGIPIN – an open-source, machine-interpretable geospatial addressing system designed to provide precise and standardised digital addresses across the country.

Traditional descriptive addresses in India suffer from a lack of uniformity and machine-readability, causing inefficiencies in postal and logistics operations. DIGIPIN aims to transform this system by introducing a geo-coded, digital public infrastructure (DPI) layer for India’s physical addressing landscape.

DIGIPIN 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.

Dr Shashank Vatedka

 DIGIPIN is the outcome of a dedicated research effort by a team of faculty from the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Hyderabad, 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.

Prof. Soumya Jana

Dr Lakshmi Prasad Natarajan

Prof. B S Murty, Director of IITH, expressed pride in the achievement, stating, “DIGIPIN represents a leap towards the vision of a digitally empowered India. 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. IITH is proud to contribute to this national initiative that blends open-source innovation, geospatial intelligence, and public service and this can be considered a revolution in the field of Navigation.”

Dr. Shashank Vatedka, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IITH, mentioned that, “DIGIPIN will provide immense convenience to Indian residents and all stakeholders by succinctly and precisely representing a physical address. For instance, it could be represented as a QR code or a barcode and printed on consignments for machine-based routing; DIGIPIN could be easily stored and communicated using digital wallets.

Dr. Lakshmi Prasad Natarajan, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IITH, mentioned that, “The idea was to make it as easy as possible to automatically assign codes and start using DIGIPIN with as little manual intervention as possible. In many cases, finding one’s DIGIPIN would be possible using only a device with a reasonably good location service (such as a smartphone) and an app equipped with a high-resolution map.”

Dr. Soumya Jana, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IITH, mentioned that “The applicability of DIGIPIN could be wider, going beyond the primary use as a digitization technology for conventional addressing. They could be used in scenarios where conventional addresses are inconsistent or not available, such as emergency response services, locating public service centres/utilities such as Health camps, Aadhar enrollment offices, and so on.”

DIGIPIN is a geohashing scheme designed to have the following features:

• The length of the DIGIPIN is designed to be as small as possible in order to provide an efficient digital representation of addresses.
• It contains the geographic location of the address. It is possible to extract the latitude and longitude of the address from the DIGIPIN with low complexity. This can also be done offline.
• All points of interest to India (including maritime regions) are assigned DIGIPIN, and it is possible to assign a unique DIGIPIN to very densely populated areas.
• The format of the DIGIPIN is intuitive and human-readable. An effort was made to infuse a sense of directionality within the format of DIGIPIN.
• Ease of code assignment and usability: A crucial point of consideration was to make it as easy as possible to automatically assign codes and start using DIGIPIN with as little manual intervention as possible. In many cases, finding one’s DIGIPIN would be possible using only a device with a reasonably good location service (such as a smartphone) and an app equipped with a high-resolution map.

DIGIPIN only encodes geographical information and contains no personal details that could lead to privacy violations.

DIGIPIN is designed to be robust to future developments and changes.

IIT Hyderabad Now Has A New PINCODE, 502284

Sub post office inaugurated at IIT Hyderabad Campus by India Post.

• A fully functional postal service window by the India Post
• It will cater to all basic postal, banking & insurance requirements of the residents.
• Reduced mailing time with a unique PIN Code of IIT Hyderabad Campus.

Hyderabad, July 08, 2021: On behalf of the Department of Posts, Telangana Circle – Sangareddy Division with its 2 Head Post Offices, 43 Sub Post Offices, and 253 Branch Post Offices serving the whole Sangareddy District (27 Mandals, 647 villages) and part of Medak District (Narsapur, Kowdipally, Alladurg, Regode, Shankarmapet-A mandals). Now, a new Post Office on the premises of IIT Hyderabad Campus will cater to the Faculty, Staff, and students of IIT Hyderabad. It will provide delivery mails which are received from various places of India as well as other countries. Small Saving Schemes which will help all generations/ categories of public, Life Insurances which are more beneficial schemes compared to any other insurance scheme in the market.

Besides these, it will also provide unique facilities like Aadhar Enabled Payments System (AEPS is a payment service that allows a bank customer to use Aadhaar as his/ her identity to access his/ her Aadhaar enabled bank account and perform basic banking transactions like balance inquiry, cash withdrawal, remittances through a Business Correspondent) through IPPB micro-ATM.

On July 08, 2021, IIT Hyderabad Sub Post Office was inaugurated by Prof. B S Murty, Director, IIT Hyderabad and Shri. S. Rajendra Kumar, CPMG, Telangana Circle, in the presence of Dr. PVS Reddy, PMG, Hyderabad HQ Region and Commodore Manohar Nambiar (Retd.), Registrar, IIT Hyderabad. A new PIN Code 502284 is allotted to IIT Hyderabad Post Office. The facility is operational from Staff Towers-1, IIT Hyderabad.

For more than 150 years, the Department of Posts (DoP) has been the backbone of the country’s communication and has played a crucial role in the country’s social-economic development. It touches the lives of each and every Indian citizen in many ways: delivering mails, accepting deposits under Small Savings Schemes, providing life insurance cover under Postal Life Insurance (PLI) and Rural Postal Life Insurance (RPLI), and providing retail services like bill collection, sale of forms, etc. The DoP also acts as an agent for the Government of India in discharging Central and State Govt. services for citizens such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) wage disbursement and old age pension payments like Aasara Pensions. With more than 1,55,000 post offices, the DoP has the most widely distributed postal network in the world.

Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) is one of the six new IITs established by the Government of India in 2008. In a short span of 12 years, the institute has become top-10 in the NIRF and QS with 241 full-time faculty and 3,397 students (20% women). The institute has a strong research focus with more than Rs 435 crore of sanctioned research funding with PhD scholars accounting for about 30% of total student strength. IITH has to its credit 5500+ research publications, 166 patent disclosures, 1440 sponsored/consultancy projects, 200 state-of-the-art laboratories, 5 research and entrepreneurship centres, and 50 industry and academic collaborations.