open-data 6

I Paid a Bribe (2010) Founded by: Janaagraha (co-founded by Swati Ramanathan & Ramesh Ramanathan) (Tracxn) Status: Ongoing as a Janaagraha initiative (current activity of the specific site varies by city/campaign; Janaagraha remains active) (janaagraha.org) Offering: Civic reporting + advocacy platform; sustained via donations/grants through Janaagraha (janaagraha.org) Financials: Janaagraha’s audited statement shows total income ₹243.46M (₹24.35 cr) for FY ending Mar 31, 2024 (janaagraha.org); FCRA statement shows donation income ₹174.38M (FY ending Mar 31, 2024) (janaagraha.org) (org-level, not IPaB-only) DataMeet (2011) Founded by: Thejesh GN and S Anand (Data{Meet}) Status: Active community (volunteer-led) (Data{Meet}) Offering: Community meetups, open-data projects; typically volunteer / partner-supported (Data{Meet}) Financials: No standardized public financial reporting (community initiative) (Data{Meet}) IndiaSpend / Spending & Policy Research Foundation (2011) Founded by: Govindraj Ethiraj (managing trustee; SPRF set up with an initial ₹10,000 investment per Oxford Academic chapter) (OUP Academic) Status: Active data journalism org (Indiaspend) Offering: Non-profit model: donations/grants; acknowledges philanthropic support (e.g., IPSMF support noted) (Indiaspend) Financials: Public exact revenues aren’t consistently published on a single page; verified datapoint: started with ₹10,000 investment (OUP Academic) SocialCops (2012) Founded by: Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka. (Forbes India) Status: No longer operating as the original “projects” startup; continued as a “data for social good community” while the team shifted focus to Atlan. (Forbes India) Offering: Earlier: data-intelligence projects + internal tools; later opened up tools for data teams and pointed users to Atlan. (Forbes India) Financials: Tracxn lists total funding of $320K (seed, Jul 30, 2014). (Tracxn) FactChecker.in (2014) (product under IndiaSpend) Founded by: IndiaSpend/SPRF initiative (PRS Legislative Research) Status: Active (as a fact-checking initiative associated with IndiaSpend) (PRS Legislative Research) Offering: Sustained via IndiaSpend’s non-profit funding base (Indiaspend) Financials: No separate public financials (bundled into parent org) (Indiaspend) How India Lives (2014) Founded by: Avinash Singh, N S Ramnath, John Samuel Raja Duraipandy (Tracxn profile); HIL’s own team page also lists Avinash Singh + Avinash Celestine as “Co-founder”. (Tracxn) Status: Active (site is live; products like “Gram” and “Sales Pulse” are being offered). (howindialives.com) Offering: Public-data products (e.g., Gram, Sales Pulse) + consulting/services around identifying/extracting/analyzing/visualising public data. (howindialives.com) Financials: Tracxn lists annual revenue of ₹1.92 Cr (as on Mar 31, 2022); Sales Pulse lists pricing at ₹35,400/quarter and ₹1,18,000/year (incl. taxes). (Tracxn) Data.gov.in / OGD Platform India (launched 2012) Founded by: Government of India (built/hosted by NIC, MeitY) (Data.gov.in) Status: Active (Wikipedia) Offering: Public digital infrastructure (tax-funded) (Data.gov.in) Financials: Not a commercial venture; budgeted via government programmes (no single “revenue” number) (Data.gov.in) CMIE – Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS) (running since 2014) Founded by: CMIE (The India Forum) Status: Active dataset used widely in research (The India Forum) Offering: Subscription access to microdata for institutions/researchers (The India Forum) Financials: One public datapoint on pricing: “membership subscription fee … $25,000 for one year” (example cited) (The India Forum) (CMIE’s own full financials may not be openly published like listed companies) Thurro (2016) Founded by: Karthik Ranganathan, Mrinalini Rao, Akhilesh Tilotia. (Thurro) Status: Active. (Thurro) Offering: Data/alternative-data driven “financial intelligence” (research, notebooks/analyses, data products). (Thurro) Financials: Tracxn lists annual revenue of ₹95.7L (as on Mar 31, 2024) and $0 funding. (Tracxn) Alt News (Feb 2017) Founded by: Pratik Sinha, Mohammed Zubair. (Wikipedia) Status: Active. (Wikipedia) Offering: Non-profit fact-checking; runs under Pravda Media Foundation (Section 8 company); funded via donations + grants. (Alt News) Financials: Alt News discloses at least ₹3,00,000 received in FY2017–18 from Zindabad Trust; Tracxn lists Pravda Media Foundation revenue ~₹2.18 Cr (FY ending Mar 31, 2025) (entity operating Alt News). (Alt News) OpenCity (2017) Founded by: A programme of the Oorvani Foundation, in collaboration with DataMeet. (re3data.org) Status: Active (Urban Data Portal continues to host datasets). (re3data.org) Offering: Open urban data portal consolidating city datasets for planners/researchers/citizens; civic-tech transparency + evidence-based governance use. (re3data.org) Financials: No venture-level financials publicly stated in the repository description; best understood as a nonprofit programme/civic-tech initiative. (re3data.org) SatSure (Sep 2017) Founded by: Prateep Basu, Rashmit Singh Sukhmani, Abhishek Raju (core team/founders listed in profile coverage). (YourStory.com) Status: Active. (YourStory.com) Offering: Geospatial / satellite-data analytics for agriculture, infrastructure, climate-risk and decisioning. (YourStory.com) Financials: Tracxn lists $27.7M total funding and (for the Indian legal entity) ₹9.65 Cr revenue (FY ending Mar 31, 2024). (Tracxn) Data Sutram (2018) Founded by: Rajit Bhattacharya, Aisik Paul, Ankit Das. (datasutram.com) Status: Active. (YourStory.com) Offering: AI-driven external-data intelligence for fraud/risk/compliance (RegTech), used by banks/NBFCs/fintechs. (YourStory.com) Financials: Raised $9M Series A (May 22, 2025) (mix of primary/secondary). Valuation is not disclosed publicly (some outlets report an estimated range, but the company hasn’t confirmed it). (YourStory.com) health-check.in (Apr 2019) Founded by: Launched by IndiaSpend (as a dedicated public-health reporting resource). (Indiaspend) Status: Active. (Indiaspend) Offering: Health data journalism + analysis on public health, nutrition, lifestyle diseases, health finance & governance. (HealthCheck) Financials: No separate public financials for the vertical; it’s sustained as part of IndiaSpend’s broader newsroom model. (Indiaspend) National Data & Analytics Platform – NDAP (launched May 13, 2022) Founded by: NITI Aayog (Press Information Bureau) Status: Active (National Data and Analytics Platform) Offering: Public data access + analytics/visualization tools (tax-funded) (Press Information Bureau) Financials: Not a commercial venture; no revenue (government platform) (Press Information Bureau) Factly (2014–2016) Founded by: Founded/led by Rakesh Dubbudu (origin story: started as a blog in 2014; later became Factly; fact-checking arm recognised as launched in early 2016) (factlylabs.com) Status: Active fact-checking + data stories (ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org) Offering: Mix of fact-checking, data journalism, and partnerships; IFCN listing describes the organisation and its work (ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org) Financials: Precise revenues aren’t reliably public in one canonical place; third-party “revenue estimate” sites are inconsistent, so I’m not treating them as verified financials (FACTLY) BOOM (BoomLive) (2014; current avatar since 2016) Founded by: Operated by Outcue Media Pvt Ltd; BOOM describes itself as India’s first fact-checking initiative (current avatar since Nov 2016) (BOOM) Status: Active (BOOM) Offering: BOOM says income is from social platforms, contract work, and training; also focuses on fact-checking & media literacy (BOOM) Financials: Tracxn reports Outcue Media revenue ₹12.2Cr for FY ending Mar 31, 2024 (Tracxn) (company-level) Alt News (Pravda Media Foundation, 2017) Founded by: Directors include Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair (Pravda Media Foundation) (Tofler) Status: Active (Tofler) Offering: Donation-funded non-profit (Moneycontrol describes it as funded primarily by donations) (Moneycontrol) Financials: Financials vary by source: Tofler lists operating revenue “under ₹1 cr” for FY ending Mar 31, 2023 (Tofler); Tracxn reports ₹2.18Cr revenue for FY ending Mar 31, 2025 (Tracxn) CivicDataLab (2018) Founded by: Co-founders Gaurav Godhwani and Deepthi Chand Alagandula (civicdatalab.in) Status: Active (company status shown as active in corporate registries) (ZaubaCorp) Offering: Public-good data/tech/design work; typically sustained via grants, partnerships, and contracted projects (data.org) Financials: Tracxn reports revenue ~₹3.9Cr for FY ending Mar 31, 2025 (Tracxn) (company-level) FactIQ (2024). Focus on US economy but has “honorary membership” on this list Founded by: Rishabh Srivastava and Medha Basu Status: Active (FactIQ) YC-backed startup Offering: B2B data product (US “facts / signals” for teams; details vary by pitch) Financials: No public revenue disclosed. YC profile Data For India (Apr 2024) Founded by: Rukmini S Status: Active Offering: Free public data + insights + charts; sustainability model not clearly specified on the launch post Financials: No public financials disclosed on the launch post/site pages referenced How India Lives (2014) Founded by: Avinash Singh, N S Ramnath, John Samuel Raja Duraipandy (Tracxn profile); HIL’s own team page also lists Avinash Singh + Avinash Celestine as “Co-founder”. (Tracxn) Status: Active (site is live; products like “Gram” and “Sales Pulse” are being offered). (howindialives.com) Offering: Public-data products (e.g., Gram, Sales Pulse) + consulting/services around identifying/extracting/analyzing/visualising public data. (howindialives.com) Financials: Tracxn lists annual revenue of ₹1.92 Cr (as on Mar 31, 2022); Sales Pulse lists pricing at ₹35,400/quarter and ₹1,18,000/year (incl. taxes). (Tracxn) Thurro (2016) Founded by: Karthik Ranganathan, Mrinalini Rao, Akhilesh Tilotia. (Thurro) Status: Active. (Thurro) Offering: Data/alternative-data driven “financial intelligence” (research, notebooks/analyses, data products). (Thurro) Financials: Tracxn lists annual revenue of ₹95.7L (as on Mar 31, 2024) and $0 funding. (Tracxn) SocialCops (2012) Founded by: Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka. (Forbes India) Status: No longer operating as the original “projects” startup; continued as a “data for social good community” while the team shifted focus to Atlan. (Forbes India) Offering: Earlier: data-intelligence projects + internal tools; later opened up tools for data teams and pointed users to Atlan. (Forbes India) Financials: Tracxn lists total funding of $320K (seed, Jul 30, 2014). (Tracxn) Alt News (Feb 2017) Founded by: Pratik Sinha, Mohammed Zubair. (Wikipedia) Status: Active. (Wikipedia) Offering: Non-profit fact-checking; runs under Pravda Media Foundation (Section 8 company); funded via donations + grants. (Alt News) Financials: Alt News discloses at least ₹3,00,000 received in FY2017–18 from Zindabad Trust; Tracxn lists Pravda Media Foundation revenue ~₹2.18 Cr (FY ending Mar 31, 2025) (entity operating Alt News). (Alt News) OpenCity (2017) Founded by: A programme of the Oorvani Foundation, in collaboration with DataMeet. (re3data.org) Status: Active (Urban Data Portal continues to host datasets). (re3data.org) Offering: Open urban data portal consolidating city datasets for planners/researchers/citizens; civic-tech transparency + evidence-based governance use. (re3data.org) Financials: No venture-level financials publicly stated in the repository description; best understood as a nonprofit programme/civic-tech initiative. (re3data.org) SatSure (Sep 2017) Founded by: Prateep Basu, Rashmit Singh Sukhmani, Abhishek Raju (core team/founders listed in profile coverage). (YourStory.com) Status: Active. (YourStory.com) Offering: Geospatial / satellite-data analytics for agriculture, infrastructure, climate-risk and decisioning. (YourStory.com) Financials: Tracxn lists $27.7M total funding and (for the Indian legal entity) ₹9.65 Cr revenue (FY ending Mar 31, 2024). (Tracxn) Data Sutram (2018) Founded by: Rajit Bhattacharya, Aisik Paul, Ankit Das. (datasutram.com) Status: Active. (YourStory.com) Offering: AI-driven external-data intelligence for fraud/risk/compliance (RegTech), used by banks/NBFCs/fintechs. (YourStory.com) Financials: Raised $9M Series A (May 22, 2025) (mix of primary/secondary). Valuation is not disclosed publicly (some outlets report an estimated range, but the company hasn’t confirmed it). (YourStory.com) health-check.in (Apr 2019) Founded by: Launched by IndiaSpend (as a dedicated public-health reporting resource). (Indiaspend) Status: Active. (Indiaspend) Offering: Health data journalism + analysis on public health, nutrition, lifestyle diseases, health finance & governance. (HealthCheck) Financials: No separate public financials for the vertical; it’s sustained as part of IndiaSpend’s broader newsroom model. (Indiaspend)

A property agent was discussing property price trends in Singapore. Thought I’d cross-check. In short, yes, prices continue to rise steadily since 2020 at ~6-8% almost everywhere. Data: https://data.gov.sg/collections/189/view Analysis: https://chatgpt.com/share/68354e8e-97f8-800c-b15c-6e537016d38e Long live open data! LinkedIn

When you start typing in the address bar, Chrome suggests a link to visit, based on frecency. What do my recommendations look like? A is for airtel.in/smartbyte-s/page.html – the page where you can check your bandwidth usage. I used to check it infrequently until I upgraded to a 125GB connection. Now I check it every few days and feel miserable that I’ve nowhere near used up my quota. This has coerced me to watch many Telugu movies, of which I don’t understand a word. B is for blog.gramener.com – I blog there on data stories. The last month or so has been fairly active thanks to the elections. C is for calendar.google.com – which has become primarily a shared calendar. It was always indispensible to manage my time. Now it helps my colleagues pick when to call me. Right now, my calendar has events booked about two months in advance. D is for docs.google.com – for effectively one single purpose: shared spreadsheets. This is such a common and powerful use case, and I’m surprised it hasn’t become much easier to use. E is for epaper.timesofindia.com – some of our content has been published by The Economic Times, and I keep doing ego-searches in the print edition. But close behind is eci.nic.in which I’ve been scraping a lot, and election-results.ibnlive.in.com which we created for CNN-IBN. F is for flipkart.com – not facebook.com. I’m not often on Facebook. G is for gramener.com. Naturally. (It’s not surprising that it’s not google.com: I search directly from the address bar.) H is for handsontable.com – a library that I’ve been using a lot recently, followed by html5please.com that tells me which HTML5 features are ready for use. I is for ibn.gramener.com – another property we created, but it only just beats irctc.co.in. J is for join.me – a clean way to share your screen without the audience having to install anything (though you the sharer do have to install the software.) K is for kraken.io – an amazingly efficient image compressor. As you might have guessed, I lead a strange life. L is for learn.gramener.com – our Intranet. Sorry, you can’t access this one. M is for mail.google.com. I’ll probably be moving away from gmail as a backend this weekend to Mail-in-a-box, though. Google’s pulling the plug on Google Reader has shaken my faith. N is for news.ycombinator.com. When I’m bored and want to watch something while I have dinner, I don’t open YouTube. I open Hacker News. O is for odc.datameet.org – the Open Data Camp. I’m quite into open data. P is for pay.airtel.com, but if you ignore the number of bills I pay, it would be pandas.pydata.org, the home page of a remarkable data processing library. Q is for quirksmode.org, PPK’s remarkable browser-compatibility guide R is for reader.s-anand.net, my self-hosted RSS reader. It used to be reader.google.com, but Google let me down there. S is for s-anand.net – this blog. T is for twitter.com. Unlike Facebook, I don’t dislike Twitter so much. U is for underscorejs.org. Clearly I need to get a life. V is for visualizing.org. They have a number of interesting data visualisations. W is for webpagetest.org – it helps measure the speed of web pages. X is for xem.github.io. I’ve probably visited this page once, but it’s the only one in my recent history that starts with X Y is for youtube.com. I lied. I spend an order of magnitude more time watching Telugu movies on YouTube than on Hacker News. Z is for zoemob.com. Again, a page I visited only once, but there’s nothing else in Z at the moment. Comments Software I currently use | s-anand.net 9 May 2014 6:24 pm (pingback): […] course, some of my apps apps have moved online, and my earlier post on the A-Z of my browsing history covers that. But there are a few applications that I’ve hosted which I must talk about. […] chandigarh 13 Oct 2015 7:27 pm: you can delete your web search history through link https://history.google.com/history

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: ...

BBC seems to be doing good work for developers at BBC Backstage. Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph are among those involved.

India Data Visualisation People Aman Bhargava Amit Kapoor - Narrative Advisors Anand Katakam Anand S Arun Ganesh - Maps Arvind Venkatadri Avinash Celestine - How India Lives Team Gaurav Godhwani - CivicDataLab Gurman Bhatia - Revisual Labs IndiaSpend Team - Public interest graphics Karthik Shashidhar Pallav Nadhani - FusionCharts Pramit Bhattacharya - Data for India Pratap Vardhan - Stats of India Priti Pandurangan Rasagy Sharma Richie Lionell Ritvvij Parrikh - Times Internet Rukmini Shrinivasan - Data for India Sajjad Anwar - Maps Shailesh Kumar - Jio Srinivasan Ramani - The Hindu Sudalai Rajkumar (SRK) - H2O.ai Venkatesh Rajamanickam - IITB Vignesh Radhakrishnan - The Hindu Vijay Natarajan - IISc Vikram Nayak - ChartBoss Outside India Arvind Satyanarayana - MIT Curran Kelleher - Independent Rishabh Srivastava Peripheral Amar Devadason - RRD Anantharaman Mani Chakradhar Saswade - NID Indranil Chakraborty Nathalie Riche - Microsoft Research Rajkamal Aich Rohit Saran Sugata Srinivasaraju Zainab Bawa - Hasgeek People I have not yet met Aakanksha Chowdhery - Google DeepMind - Model behavior visuals Abhinav Vajpayee - Razorpay - Fintech economy metrics Abhishek Waghmare - Data for India - Researcher and writer focusing on deep dives into employment, economy, and public data. Aditya Goenka - Independent - Power BI training Amanat Kaur - Independent - Identity-driven data art Amit Kumar Das - Visual BI - Executive dashboards Anoushka Dalmia - DataLeads - Health data journalism Anurag Rao - Reuters Graphics - Illustrator and Information Designer; combines artistic illustration with rigorous data reporting. Apar Gupta - Strategic Advisor - Policy communication Arjun Gopal - Independent - Generative visual systems Ashris Choudhury - India in Pixels - Cultural motion graphics Ayushi Kar - The Reporters’ Collective - Data journalist known for investigative work on electoral bonds and political funding. Bhanu Kamapantula - Independent - Public data scraping/viz Chitraksh Sharma - CivicDataLab - Social justice visuals Dipanjan Sarkar - Independent - Visual NLP & ML Divya Ribeiro - Revisual Labs / Godrej Design Lab - Project Lead for the award-winning Building a Climate Conscious India report. Harshit Agrawal - Independent - A pioneer in AI and generative art in India; explores the intersection of human-machine creativity (often associated with BeFantastic). Herry Gulabani - IIHS - Climate risk mapping Ipsa Jain Kabir Agarwal - Independent - Climate & agri data Kanika Gupta - Independent - Civic storytelling Kannan Sundar - The Hindu - National Design Editor at The Hindu; leads the team responsible for award-winning infographics and print layouts (SND, Malofiej). Karthikeya G S - Reuters Graphics - Won a Bronze at the Information is Beautiful Awards 2023 for Screens of August. Krish Naik - Independent - Technical ML/Viz tutorials Manish Gupta - Google Research - Knowledge graphs Nandita Kumar - Independent - New media artist known for complex installations that visualize environmental data and sound (e.g., Gali Art Project, Khoj). Nasr Ul Hadi - Newsroom data strategy Natasha Singh - Timeblur Naveen Bagalkot - Srishti Manipal - Data physicalization Osama Manzar - DEF - Digital inclusion mapping Padmini Ray Murray - Design Beku Paresh Dobariya - GetOnData - BI consulting Parvathy Arangath - Reuters Graphics / NID Alum - Won the ‘Rising Star’ Gold at the Information is Beautiful Awards 2023. Piyanka Jain - Aryng - Visual decision frameworks Prasann Prem - VizDiner - Tableau mentorship Prasanta Kumar Dutta - Reuters Graphics Prashanth Southekal - DBP Institute - Data monetization Puru Shinde - Independent - 3D/WebGL visualization Raj Bhagat Palanichamy - WRI India - Satellite imagery & GIS Ramprakash Ramamoorthy - Zoho - LLM/UI interfaces Ruchi Sharma - Independent - Generative code art Samarth Bansal - Independent - Data-led investigations Sannuta Raghu - Scroll.in - Head of the AI Lab at Scroll.in; leads innovative news product experiments and data-led investigations. Sheetal Agarwal - Tableau Visionary - Enterprise analytics Shreya Suri - Independent - Long-form visual stories Shriya Anand - IIHS - Urban spatial research Shyamlal Yadav - The Indian Express - Senior Editor and RTI expert; a pioneer in using the Right to Information Act for data-driven investigative reporting. Sudev Kiyada - Reuters Graphics - Graphics Journalist based in Bangalore; winner of an Information is Beautiful Award (2023) for work on North Korea. Sumeet Moghe - Thoughtworks - Delivery system visuals Surbhi Bhatia - Independent - Information designer recognized by FlowingData for projects like “Battle of the Chocolate Bars”. Tanay Sukumar - Mint - Leads the Plain Facts team at Mint, overseeing one of India’s most consistent daily data journalism sections. Tarun Deep Girdher - NID The Ken Data Team - Business narrative charts Tushar Arora - Google - Observability UX Upasana Nattoji Roy - Switch Studio - Motion designer and artist working with interactive installations and data narratives (e.g., Give Me A Sign). Vardhini Kalyanaraman - Independent - Data literacy comics Vasanth Kumar - Independent - Dashboard UI architecture Vijdan Mohammad Kawoosa - Reuters Graphics - Data and Graphics Journalist; formerly with Hindustan Times, known for mapping and conflict visualization. Vineeth Balasubramaniam - IIT Hyderabad - Explainable AI (XAI) Partha Talukdar - Google Research Sources Amit Kapoor’s list Gemini