India's 70 Years of Public Data Now Searchable With AI

Imagine spending days digging through a 600-page government report just to find one statistic. That was reality for anyone trying to access India's public data until now.

Rakesh Dubbudu, a 42-year-old engineer turned transparency activist, spent years watching this frustration play out. Parliamentary debates, census records, and ministry reports technically existed online, but finding anything useful meant endless manual searching through PDFs and scanned documents.

In 2016, he founded Factly in Hyderabad with a straightforward mission: make public information actually public. His team of 30 people spent years cleaning and organizing decades of government data into structured formats anyone could use.

Then they built something game-changing. Dataful and Tagore AI are AI-powered search tools that let users find specific data points in seconds instead of sifting through hundreds of pages.

The impact shows in the numbers. Over 40,000 people now use Dataful, from PhD students researching agriculture to fintech companies analyzing economic trends.

Government officials are signing up with official email addresses to download datasets, a clear sign that even the agencies producing this data struggle to access it easily. NGOs working on health and development can now pull CSR data without filing Right to Information requests.

For journalists, these tools changed everything. Abhishek Anand from The Quint used to spend hours hunting down single data points across different government websites during election coverage.

"Finding one data point in a 600-page report was exhausting," he says. Now he can show readers what data actually reveals over time, not just react to political claims.

Shashidhar KG at MediaNama found similar relief. His tech policy publication tracks certain regulators closely, but other ministries publish data inconsistently or not at all.

Dataful's consolidated datasets let his team expand their reporting beyond usual beats. They can quickly add context from ministries they don't monitor daily.

The Ripple Effect

The transformation goes deeper than convenience. Researchers are building better studies with complete data sets. Social organizations are making evidence-based decisions about where help is needed most.

Stories about unemployment patterns, crimes against women, and student welfare are getting told with real depth because reporters can finally see trends across years. Democracy depends on informed citizens, but information only works when people can actually use it.

Rakesh's decade-long journey from RTI activist to tech innovator proved a simple truth: the data was always there. It just needed someone to unlock it.

Now, what took days takes seconds, and public information is finally serving the public it belongs to.