DIGIPIN support

Hi everyone,

as you may have seen, India Post recently announced the launch of DIGIPIN, a highly-precise location identifier.

DIGIPINs are 10-digit alphanumeric codes (12 characters when the two dashes are included) corresponding to 4mx4m squares. The DIGIPIN is derived by transforming the latitude and longitude of the location, and will never change, even if what is on the 4mx4m square changes. Basically, every location in India now has a highly precise, unchangeable address.

This is a welcome development as addressing in India has been challenging. India is a massive, highly-diverse, and rapidly changing country (for more background on the challenge you may enjoy our thread about Indian #geoweirdness), and people have many different ways (and indeed many different languages) for referring to locations. This can often lead to confusion and misunderstandings, and, frankly, makes geocoding a real challenge.

In response to the roll out of DIGIPINs we have made two changes to our geocoding API.

First up, for any geocoding result in India (by which we mean the bounding box covered by DIGIPIN as announced by India Post) we now return a DIGIPIN annotation (see the relevant documentation)

So for example when you send us an API request with q=Taj+Mahal we now return

        "annotations" : {
            "DIGIPIN" : "32C-849-5CKC",

It is important to remember the DIGIPIN annotation, just like all annotations is based on the coordinates of the result. Learn more about annotations.

Secondly, we now support querying by DIGIPIN. So for example you can request q=32C-849-5CKC. When you send us such a query we will convert the DIGIPIN to coordinates and then treat the request as a normal reverse geocoding request. We will however set the _type value in the components portion of the result to digipin.

The result looks like this:

         "components" : {
            "ISO_3166-1_alpha-2" : "IN",
            "ISO_3166-1_alpha-3" : "IND",
            "ISO_3166-2" : [
               "IN-UP"
            ],
            "_category" : "postcode",
            "_normalized_city" : "Agra",
            "_type" : "digipin",
            "city" : "Agra",
            "continent" : "Asia",
            "country" : "India",
            "country_code" : "in",
            "digipin" : "32C-849-5CKC",
            "state" : "Uttar Pradesh",
            "state_code" : "UP",
            "state_district" : "Agra",
            "suburb" : "Taj Ganj"
         },
         "confidence" : 10,
         "distance_from_q" : {
            "meters" : 0
         },
         "formatted" : "32C-849-5CKC, Taj Ganj, Agra, India",
         "geometry" : {
            "lat" : 27.175001,
            "lng" : 78.042105
         }

As with any new features, we welcome your feedback.

Congratulations to India Post on the launch of this new, more-precise addressing service.

Happy geocoding, whether using addresses, coordinates, or now also DIGIPINs

Ed