By Utpal Kaushik, Management Consultant at Avalon Consulting and Vidushi Goel Management Consultant at Avalon Consulting
Every time you order online, you would have found yourself giving directions like, “It’s the fourth house after the hospital, next to the building with the blue gate,” or gotten to the point of sharing your current location pin because the explanation for the address alone just doesn’t cut it. In India, addresses often fail to convey the full story; one has to rely on landmarks or even trees to be precise. Addresses are vague, inconsistent and in many cases, not even mapped properly on Google Maps. Whether it’s a quick commerce delivery, a courier, or a cab ride, reaching your doorstep usually needs a phone call, a landmark and a fair bit of luck.
It’s not just about the minor irritation of guiding a Zomato rider or Uber driver over the phone, India’s unstructured address system causes much deeper, systemic issues.
Nearly 30% of postal PIN codes are entered incorrectly from the user’s end and a typical “nearby” location in Indian parlance can be as far as 80 metres away. For urban couriers, online deliveries, or ride-hailing drivers navigating multiple stops per hour, this means lost time, extra fuel, fewer deliveries & the invaluable cost of emotional and mental struggle that the delivery all of which drive up cost. An insider at one of India’s largest food delivery app tells us that of the 1 million failed deliveries per month, the split of failures due to wrong addresses is nearly 10%, an estimated 20 million rupees lost.
The impact of this mess is substantial. According to estimates from researchers and industry leaders like Santanu Bhattacharya, former Head of Tech at Delhivery, in a 2018 research paper, he estimates that the lack of a good addressing system costs India $10-14B annually, or more than the budget of many small states like Goa, Sikkim, Tripura etc.
Let’s break that down:
E-commerce: As India eyes a $500 billion e-commerce logistics market by 2026, failed or delayed deliveries due to address errors result in higher logistics costs and reverse logistics.
Transportation: Ride-hailing apps lose productive minutes every hour as drivers loop around trying to find a location. That adds up to real money when scaled across thousands of drivers nationwide.
Banking & Land Records: In rural India, property identification is a separate mess. Plot numbers like khasra, khatauni, or 7/12 extracts are not standardised across states. A single piece of land may show up with different identifiers on tax slips, land deeds and court papers. This makes it harder for banks to validate mortgages, slowing down rural credit and increasing the chance of fraud.
DIGIPIN is a nationwide geo-coded addressing system developed by the Department of Posts in collaboration with IIT Hyderabad. It divides India into approximately 4m x 4m grids and assigns each grid a unique 10-character alphanumeric code based on latitude and longitude coordinates.
The ability of DIGIPIN to function as a persistent, interoperable location identifier across India’s dispersed public and private networks is what gives it its real power. Unlike normal addresses, which depend on textual descriptions, a DIGIPIN condenses the geo-coordinates, administrative metadata and unique spatial identifiers into a 10-character alphanumeric string. Because of which, DIGIPIN is readable by machines, compatible with maps and unaffected by changes in naming conventions. When combined with systems like Aadhaar (identity), UPI (payments), ULPIN (land) and UPIC (property), DIGIPIN can enable seamless KYC validation, last-mile delivery automation, digital land titling and geographic analytics.
For instance, without sending out a field officer, a lending institution can utilize DIGIPIN to quickly confirm the existence, ownership and geolocation. Similarly, logistics platforms can map delivery clusters using DIGIPIN datasets, optimizing route planning based on hyper-local density rather than PIN code boundaries. In essence, DIGIPIN transforms an address into a digitally verifiable asset, anchoring identity and services to a fixed point in space – reliably, scalably and securely.
India is not the first country to face this challenge. Globally, several models offer interesting ideas:
UK: Postcodes combined with house numbers pinpoint a location with almost surgical accuracy.
What3Words: This UK startup divides the world into 3×3 metre grids, assigning three random words to each. It’s been adopted for logistics and emergency services in over 40 countries.
Dubai: Introduced Makani numbers – 10-digit codes tied to precise building entrances, used across all government services.
Japan: Uses a block system instead of street names but relies heavily on clear signage and citizen familiarity.
Each of these systems works because they are memorable, precise and scalable – qualities DIGIPIN must also strive for.
For DIGIPIN to become the default address format in India, it has to succeed across three critical dimensions:
A 10-character code might be accurate, but is it memorable? For a busy delivery rider or a rural farmer, remembering and sharing it must be easier than reciting a landmark-heavy address.
The code must be accepted across platforms – Aadhaar, land registries, GST, KYC forms, food delivery apps and banks. Without this ecosystem-level integration, it risks becoming just another number in a sea of bureaucratic codes.
With over 350 million Indians still not using smartphones, any address system must be usable offline or via SMS, voice, or printed format. Otherwise, it risks excluding the very communities it aims to help.
If there’s one lesson from Aadhaar, UPI and India Stack, it’s this: build like a startup, scale like the state.
Make DIGIPIN easy to generate, update and share – like a mobile number.
Encourage private-public partnerships – let e-commerce and ride-hailing apps integrate the codes.
Run awareness campaigns to drive mass adoption, especially in rural and semi-urban areas.
Build interoperability across departments – so one address means the same thing to the bank, post office, land registry and the tax department.
DIGIPIN could be a game-changer – if implemented well. India’s digital revolution cannot afford to be built on vague addresses and vanishing landmarks. A reliable, scalable and user-friendly address system is not just a logistical improvement – it’s an enabler of economic growth, digital governance and social inclusion.
We’ve figured out payments (UPI), IDs (Aadhaar) and vaccination (CoWIN) at scale. Now it’s time we pin down addresses – and win the last-mile revolution.