I wanted to know how much India spends on healthcare per citizen. Random conversation with a friend. The kind of thing Perplexity answers in seconds — and it did. But I wanted to know more related stuff. So I went to data.gov.in, then indiabudget.gov.in, then a MOSPI PDF from 2019. After a while I had a number. But the experience reminded me of the dearth of reliable, consolidated sources of public data that are easily accessible by an average Indian citizen. Someone who belongs to the world's largest democracy. The data exists. It's buried in dense PDFs, broken APIs, and spreadsheets formatted for bureaucrats. Presented with zero empathy for the person trying to understand their own country. I built what I think doesn't exist (if it does, happy to coexist). Indian Data Project is my attempt at an open data platform that takes government data from RBI, MOSPI, World Bank, NCRB, Election Commission, and 30+ other sources and presents it as scrollytelling data stories a person can actually follow. You scroll, the data reveals itself in sequence, one section at a time. Numbers are physically large. Visualisations paint directly onto the page — not at all like a government portal. 11 data domains today: Union Budget, Economic Survey, RBI monetary policy, State Finances, Census, Education, Employment, Healthcare, Environment, Elections, Crime & Safety. Every number is sourced from public government data. With this many domains, there will be errors and gaps I haven't caught. It's version 1. Beyond the stories: personalisation calculators, searchable citizen questions, embeddable charts for journalists, lesson plans for teachers, and an open data API. The infrastructure problem turned out to be deeper than the UX problem — when you try to automate data collection from Indian government sources, you discover how broken the plumbing really is. 11 automated pipelines now handle most of it. Open source under AGPL. No login, no paywall, no tracking. If you spot a wrong number, know a better data source, or work with Indian government data and want to help make this more accurate — I'd like to hear from you. This needs more hands than mine. Whether anyone ends up using it or not, the data should be accessible. That's kinda the whole point.

Indian Data Project

Indian government data, finally readable by citizens

Indian government data, finally readable by citizens