India's Karnataka Puts 1.5 Million Datasets in One Place

Finding the right data in India used to mean clicking through dozens of government websites and research portals, hoping you'd eventually stumble on what you needed. A new platform from Karnataka just changed that.

The state's Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence launched Tathyakosh on August 12, bringing together information about more than 1.5 million datasets into one searchable interface. The platform pulls from 458 repositories across 16 areas, including health, agriculture, education, environment, and governance.

IT Minister Priyank Kharge announced the platform in Bengaluru, emphasizing that India's AI ambitions depend on making existing data easier to find and use. The country has plenty of public information scattered across institutions, but accessing it has always been the challenge.

Tathyakosh doesn't store data itself. Instead, it works as a discovery layer that helps users locate what they need, then directs them to the original source.

The platform covers 346 Indian sources plus 37 international repositories containing India-relevant data. Over 92% of indexed datasets are open access, and 95% are machine-readable, meaning software and computational tools can work with them directly.

Users can filter by location, subject, time period, file format, and access type. Each dataset gets assessed on seven quality factors, including freshness, completeness, and accessibility, so researchers know upfront whether the information will actually work for their project.

Karnataka receives special focus, with more than 50,000 state-related datasets already indexed from sources like the Karnataka Open Government Data Portal, the Indian Institute of Science, and the Raman Research Institute. Historical coverage extends back to 1947.

The Ripple Effect

The timing matters. As India builds its AI ecosystem, developers and startups increasingly need large volumes of structured data to train models and build applications. Healthcare projects, agricultural innovations, climate research, financial inclusion tools, and legal tech all depend on finding the right datasets quickly.

Universities can now explore cross-sector data without hunting through individual repositories. Dr. N. Manjula, Secretary of Karnataka's Department of Electronics, IT and BT, noted that the platform saves researchers time they would have spent searching each source separately.

The platform operates as an open, non-commercial Digital Public Good. It doesn't claim ownership of any datasets or charge for access, keeping the focus on making information discoverable rather than creating another database.

As more government and research institutions digitize their records, Tathyakosh's index is expected to grow. For now, it offers something India's data ecosystem has needed: a single starting point that helps people discover what already exists before they spend resources looking elsewhere.

Tathyakosh is live now at Tathyakosh.in, ready for anyone who needs Indian data for research, policy, or innovation.