How to make DIGIPIN popular?

Addresses in India can be complicated. And at times amusing! Quoting from kamat.com,

Times have changed, and I think the physical addresses have evolved over the decades. We usually refer to landmarks, door numbers (old door number & new door number in the same address).

I have found that DIGIPIN (Digital Postal Index Number) gets the user to the correct location more effectively than Google Maps. Yes, DIGIPIN does use Google Maps & Mappls to show the route, but when it comes to pinpointing the location, DIGIPIN is better. I say this because people are usually on the parallel street of my home and office when I shared the Google Maps location. Users never lost their way when they used DIGIPIN.

The traditional 6-digit PINCODE is making way for the DIGIPIN — a 10-character alphanumeric digital code that pinpoints your exact geographic location. DIGIPIN is a geospatial reference system developed by the Department of Posts, in collaboration with IIT Hyderabad and ISRO’s NRSC.

DIGIPIN as a Digital Public Infrastructure

The Policy Document from India Post provides detailed insights into the Digital Hub for Reference & Unique Virtual Address (DHRUVA) – the proposed DPI for address information management in India. It includes the design principles, key interfaces, and the legal and policy safeguards necessary for its safe and effective functioning.

DIGIPIN contains the geographic location of the area. It is possible to extract the latitude and longitude of the address from the DIGIPIN with low complexity.. Quoting from the technical document of DIGIPIN,

“DIGIPIN is visualised as an alpha numeric offline grid system that divides the geographical territory of India into uniform 4-meter by 4-meter(approx.) units. Each of these 4m X 4m units (approx.) is assigned a unique 10-digit alphanumeric code, derived from the latitude and longitude coordinates of the unit.”

The technical document includes code for converting

• latitude-longitude as input and encodes it into a 10 digit alphanumeric code
• a 10 digit alphanumeric code (DIGIPIN) as input and encodes it into degree-decimal coordinates

The application world should use the above APIs to further strengthen its product.

How to increase the usage of DIGIPIN?

Popular B2C apps should have a field for the customer to provide their DIGIPIN,

1. Ride-sharing apps: Ola, Uber
2. Food Apps: Swiggy, Zomato
3. Delivery apps: Porter
4. E-commerce apps

All government and corporate offices must start publishing their DIGIPIN in their addresses. We have started adding our DIGIPIN to our visiting cards.

How to make it easier to translate a DIGIPIN to a location?

In HTML, mailto: and tel: are URI schemes used within the href attribute of the <a> (anchor) element to create hyperlinks that interact with external applications. The mailto: scheme opens the user’s default email client to compose a message, while tel: opens the default phone dialer (primarily on mobile devices) to initiate a call. These are standard features defined in HTML5 and related RFCs (e.g., RFC 6068 for mailto: and RFC 3966 for tel:).

Both schemes rely on the user’s device having the appropriate default application configured. They work best on mobile browsers but can function on desktops with compatible software (e.g., Outlook for email or a VoIP app for calls).

It would help to introduce a “digipin:” HTML tag, which will make it easier to open external apps such as Google Maps or Mappls to show the location of the 10-digit DIGIPIN code. This will avoid the extra step users have to take of copying/pasting in a mapping app. Mappls seems to already be recognizing the 10-digit DIGIPIN code, which is a welcome feature, but we still need an HTML tag “digipin:” to increase the usage of DIGIPIN.

Get your own DIGIPIN by visiting the website here! And just don’t your DIGIPIN, start using it!