Karnataka Launches Tathyakosh to Make 1.5 Million Public Datasets Easier to Find

The Karnataka government’s Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence has launched 

Tathyakosh.in, a unified data discovery platform that brings together more than 1.5 million datasets from 458 sources, aiming to make India’s fragmented public data ecosystem easier to search, assess and use.

“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,” Karnataka IT-BT Minister Priyank Kharge said.

Tathyakosh currently indexes more than 1.5 million datasets across 16 domains, including healthcare, agriculture, education, infrastructure, environment, economy and governance.

The platform draws data from 346 Indian sources and 37 international repositories containing India-relevant datasets. More than 92% of the catalogued datasets are open access, while 95% are machine-readable.

Instead of requiring users to search individual government portals, research institutions and repositories, Tathyakosh provides a single interface through which they can discover datasets and assess their suitability.

“India has no shortage of data. The challenge is knowing where the data is, whether it is relevant and 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.

A key feature of Tathyakosh is its dataset quality assessment. Each dataset receives a score across seven parameters such as findability, accessibility, machine-readability, freshness, completeness, granularity and coverage completeness.

The platform also provides information on factors such as the dataset’s domain, geography, time period, format and access type. Its historical coverage currently extends back to 1947.

“There is a lot of data available, but it is often spread across different platforms and institutions. Tathyakosh gives users a way to find that information without having to search each source separately. Importantly, the platform also helps users assess the quality and fitness of data for their specific needs, making it easier to identify reliable and ready-to-use datasets. That can save considerable time for developers, researchers and data scientists,” said N Manjula, Secretary, Karnataka’s Electronics, IT and BT.

Karnataka has a significant presence on the platform, with more than 50,000 Karnataka-specific datasets already catalogued.

These include datasets from the Karnataka Open Government Data Portal, Mahiti Kanaja, KSRSAC/K-GIS, the Indian Institute of Science and the Raman Research Institute, among others.

The platform could be used by universities and researchers for cross-sector studies, by startups building data-driven applications and technology companies developing AI systems that require structured datasets.

The launch comes as access to reliable and usable data becomes increasingly important for AI development.

Startups and research teams working in areas such as healthcare, agriculture, climate, legal research and financial inclusion often need to identify available datasets before developing applications or training computational systems.

Tathyakosh is intended to address this initial discovery problem by allowing users to assess what data exists, where it comes from and whether it is suitable for their intended use.

The platform does not host or store the underlying datasets. Instead, it indexes information about datasets and directs users to the original source, preserving ownership with the institution that published the data.

This model allows Tathyakosh to function as a discovery layer across India’s public data ecosystem rather than becoming another repository of datasets. The platform is expected to expand as more government departments, research institutions and other organisations make their datasets available, potentially creating a broader discovery infrastructure for India’s growing AI and data economy.