IIT Hyderabad, ISRO develop DIGIPIN to standardise address systems in India

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad has created DIGIPIN, a “national-scale geospatial addressing system for India”, in collaboration with the Department of Posts and the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

DIGIPIN is a geo-coded, digital public infrastructure (DPI) system that will create uniform and machine-readable addresses in India to eliminate inefficiencies in postal and logistics operations. It will accurately encode the latitude and longitude of any point in India, from population-dense cities to remote maritime locations.

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The IIT Hyderabad-designed DIGIPIN is equipped to have the following features:

• The length of the DIGIPIN is to be as small as possible in order to provide an efficient digital representation of addresses.
• 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 are assigned a unique DIGIPIN.
• The format of the DIGIPIN is human-readable as well as machine-readable.
• It is as easy as possible to 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.

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IIT Hyderabad DIGIPIN team

The DIGIPIN location software is created by a team from the department of electrical engineering at IIT Hyderabad . It consisted of Shashank Vatedka, Soumya Jana and Lakshmi Prasad Natarajan, along with Tarandeep Singh, a former student of Master of Technology (MTech) in artificial intelligence.

Talking about the location software, Jana said, “DIGIPIN 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.”

BS Murty, director of IIT Hyderabad, expressed his pride at contributing towards a digitally empowered India through a “simple, verifiable, and interoperable” address infrastructure.