Breaking Data Silos: How GDI is Transforming Access to Geospatial Information in India

For years, some of India’s most valuable geospatial datasets remained scattered across government departments, research institutes, or private organizations. They held immense potential to transform logistics, strengthen climate resilience, and support smarter urban planning, but they remained difficult to access, buried in different formats and lacking interoperability.

Recognizing this challenge, the Government of India through the Department of Science and Technology (DST) tasked the Centre of Data for Public Good (CDPG) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) with a bold vision:  to develop a standards-based geospatial data exchange platform. The result was the Integrated Geospatial Data Exchange Interface (GDI) – a unified, open-access system built on OGC APIs, designed to make metadata-rich, analysis-ready geospatial data available for application developers, researchers, startups, and policymakers alike.