Mapping PIN codes

I haven’t found an open or reliable database providing the geo-location of Indian PIN codes. That’s a bother if you’re creating geographic mash-ups. The closest were commercial sources:

  • a PIN code directory from the Postal Training Centre for Rs. 2,000, which probably just contains a list of PIN codes, and
  • a PIN code map from MapMyIndia for Rs. 1,00,000, whose quality I’m not sure of. (I spoke to one of their sales representatives who mentioned that the data was gathered via companies such as Coca Cola, using their local distribution knowledge, perhaps GPSs.)

Crowd-sourcing this might help. Here’s a site where you can map the location of any PIN code you know:

pincode.datameet.org

For example, if you knew the exact location of the PIN code 110083 (which happens to be Mongolpuri in New Delhi), just go to http://pincode.datameet.org/IN/110083 and move the marker to where it should be.

I’ve initially populated the data from GeoNames. Arun has offered OpenStreetMap data. If you know of any sources that we could use, please let me know. And if you want to use the data, feel free. It’s CC licensed. You can check out the source on github too.

7 thoughts on “Mapping PIN codes”

  1. Arun Anantharaman

    Not sure if I am doing something wrong, but am unable to edit on the pincode.datameet.org page. Get an error if I click on the “go” button.

  2. great work!
    But for some reason I could not view the markers on map.
    Is this browser not supported: Chromium on Linux ?

  3. Hi All,

    I was wondering if there is a database dumb which will give me list of all pin codes surrounding a particular pin code, do we have any such database? if not should we start crowd sourcing?. Please let me know if I am not clear with my question.

    Regard
    Rakesh

  4. the website has been removed.
    i’m trying to find the coordinates of pincodes, i have the list of entire pincodes but where i found there coordinates

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