The Government of Karnataka’s Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, ACSEL Technology Forum, today launched Tathyakosh.in, a digital public good aimed at making India’s fragmented public data ecosystem easier to discover, assess and use.
Launched by Priyank Kharge, Minister for Home, Information Technology, Biotechnology and E-Governance, Government of Karnataka, Tathyakosh brings together more than 1.5 million datasets from 458 sources on a single searchable platform. The platform is designed to help researchers, startups, developers and policymakers identify and assess public datasets without having to search across multiple government portals, research institutions and repositories.
The platform catalogues datasets using standardised information covering parameters such as domain, geography, time period, format and access type. It currently spans 16 domains, including health, agriculture, education, infrastructure, environment, economy and governance. Of the 458 sources indexed, 346 are Indian sources, while 37 international repositories contain India-relevant data. More than 92% of the datasets are open access, and 95% are machine-readable.
“India’s AI ambitions will depend not only on talent and computing power, but also on our ability to find and use the vast amount of data that already exists across our institutions. Tathyakosh addresses a fundamental gap by making this data discoverable, structured and easier to use. By building it as an open, non-commercial digital public good, we are creating an important piece of infrastructure for researchers, startups, developers and policymakers to build with Indian data,” said Priyank Kharge.
The platform is intended to address a key challenge in India’s data ecosystem, where large volumes of public data remain distributed across disconnected platforms and institutions. Tathyakosh provides information to help users determine the relevance, reliability and usability of datasets before accessing them from their original sources.
“India has no shortage of data. The challenge is knowing where the data is, whether it is relevant, whether it is reliable and whether it can be used. We wanted to make it easier for a researcher, developer, policymaker or startup to discover what already exists before spending time and resources looking for it elsewhere,” said Ashok Kamath, Director, ACSEL Technology Forum.
Each dataset on Tathyakosh carries a quality score across seven dimensions: findability, accessibility, machine-readability, freshness, completeness, granularity and coverage completeness. The platform’s historical coverage currently extends back to 1947, providing users with an additional measure of the availability and usability of datasets.
As AI adoption expands across areas such as healthcare, agriculture, climate, legal research and financial inclusion, access to structured and usable datasets is becoming increasingly important for startups, researchers and technology teams. Tathyakosh is positioned as a discovery layer to help these users identify datasets that may be relevant to their applications and research.
The platform has a particular focus on Karnataka, with more than 50,000 Karnataka-specific datasets already catalogued. These include data from the Karnataka Open Government Data Portal, Mahiti Kanaja, KSRSAC/K-GIS, the Indian Institute of Science, the Raman Research Institute and other institutions in Bengaluru.
Dr N. Manjula, Secretary, Department of Electronics, IT and BT, Government of Karnataka, said Tathyakosh enables users to find information across different platforms and institutions without having to search each source separately. She added that the platform’s assessment of data quality and fitness could help developers, researchers and data scientists identify datasets that are suitable for their requirements.
Tathyakosh is built as an open, non-commercial digital public good and does not store the underlying datasets. Instead, users are directed to the original source of each dataset, retaining the ownership of the data while providing a unified discovery mechanism.
The platform is available at Tathyakosh.