An API based access to official masterdata for India
India as a country is rapidly going digital. This includes a whole bunch of digital services at the government level. There is of course The digital India Initiative. This is a treasure trove of data of so many sources. The challenge was discoverability. Also, there are still some data elements that didn’t exist especially related to banking, commerce, people and places. Let me explain with a few examples.
- The list of Banks and Branches in India
- List of phone numbers in India? What is a valid Phone Number
- List of say pincodes of in India. What is a valid pin code.
- PAN numbers (not the entire list) but being able to validate a PAN number.
I am sure you can come up with more from your businesses needs that would be master data at the country level and would not be easily available in a machine readable form (think API). So I have been toying with the idea of creating such a curated list of master data API that would be relevant to India. If you think you have more, please drop me a note.