Skillcept Online
Key takeaways
- Data on data.gov.in is under GODL-India: a worldwide, royalty-free licence to use, adapt and publish it, for commercial and non-commercial purposes, if you credit the provider, the source and the licence.1
- The portal is vast: its APIs page listed 184,790 APIs on 22 Oct 2026, and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare alone had published 206,980 datasets by September 2026.23
- Not every source uses GODL: RBI’s DBIE permits reproduction with an acknowledgement of the source, IMD asks you to cite its paper for its gridded rainfall, and Cricsheet uses the Open Data Commons Attribution License.61618
- Start small: ECI’s 2024 constituency summary is 38 KB, NCRB’s district cyber-crime table 128 KB and IMD’s rainfall since 1901 435 KB.121115
The 16 sources at a glance
Most of these are on data.gov.in, so one licence covers them. The rest set their own terms, shown here as each source states them.
| Source | What it holds | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| data.gov.inNIC, MeitY | Datasets from ministries, states and Parliament | GODL-India |
| NDAPNITI Aayog | Government data to search and merge, by state and district | GODL listed in its policy |
| eSankhyiki APIsMoSPI | CPI, labour force, national accounts, time use | GODL-India |
| DBIERBI | GDP, inflation, interest rates, money and credit | Reuse with credit to the RBI |
| Mandi pricesDMI, via Agmarknet | Daily prices by market and commodity | GODL-India |
| MicrodataMoSPI | Unit-level survey files | MoSPI’s policies |
| Census 2011 abstractRegistrar General | Population, literacy and workers | GODL-India |
| NFHS-5 districtsIIPS | Health, nutrition and schooling by district | GODL-India |
| Crime in IndiaNCRB | Crimes by type, state and district | GODL-India |
| Lok Sabha 2024ECI | Electors, polling stations and turnout | GODL-India |
| Pincode directoryDepartment of Posts | Post offices, pincodes and coordinates | GODL-India |
| Air qualityCPCB | Hourly pollutant readings by station | GODL-India |
| RainfallIMD | Monthly since 1901; daily grids | GODL-India; for the grids, cite IMD |
| Kisan Call CentreAgriculture ministry | Farmers’ questions and the answers given | GODL-India |
| Cricsheet | IPL ball-by-ball | ODC Attribution |
| MASSIVE and FLEURSAmazon, Google | Text and speech in Indian languages | CC BY 4.0 |
Every link below was opened on 22 Oct 2026. Portals change: if a link moves, search the publisher’s site for the dataset’s name.
Can you use and publish this data?
Yes, if it’s on data.gov.in and you credit it. The Government Open Data License – India (GODL-India) gives every user a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use, adapt, publish, translate and build products and services on the data, for all lawful commercial and non-commercial purposes.1 In return:
- Credit it: publish an attribution statement naming the provider, the source and the licence, with the data’s link.
- Don’t imply endorsement: nothing may suggest the provider backs you or your work.
- Check it yourself: the provider isn’t liable for errors or gaps.
- Know what’s excluded: personal information, logos and official symbols, and data the provider can’t share aren’t covered.
The licence sets the attribution format:1
[Name of Data Provider], [Year of Publication], [Name of Data],
[Name of Data Repository/Website], [Version Number and/or Date of
Publication (dd/mm)], [DOI / URL / URI]. Published under [Name of
License]: [URL of License].Filled in for the NCRB file further down:
National Crime Records Bureau, 2024, District-wise Number of Cyber
Crimes during 2022, Open Government Data Platform India, 12/04,
https://www.data.gov.in/resource/district-wise-number-cyber-crimes-during-2022.
Published under Government Open Data License - India:
https://www.data.gov.in/Godl.Sources outside data.gov.in set their own terms, quoted in each card below. Where a source names no licence, credit it, link to its files rather than copying them into your repository, and publish your analysis.
Start with the national portals
Two portals hold most of what follows. Learn their search pages and you’ll find data for almost any question.
data.gov.in: Open Government Data Platform IndiaGODL-India
Holds: data.gov.in, hosted by the National Informatics Centre for MeitY, carries datasets from central ministries, states and Parliament. Among central publishers, the biggest by September 2026 were the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (206,980 datasets), the Ministry of Home Affairs (46,675) and the Rajya Sabha (36,267).3 You download files or call the API with a key; its APIs page listed 184,790 APIs on 22 Oct 2026.2
Try: search “district-wise” plus a topic you know, and join two files on district names. Fixing the spellings that don’t match is half the project.
NDAP: National Data and Analytics PlatformGODL listed
Holds: NITI Aayog’s NDAP lets you search, merge, visualise and download government datasets, many at state and district level, such as district-wise MSME counts and irrigated area. A free sign-up is needed to open a dataset.4
Licence: its policy page lists the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy and the Government Open Data License; its terms of use don’t restate a licence for each dataset, so credit NDAP and the original ministry.4
Try: merge district MSME counts with irrigated area, and ask whether districts with more irrigation have more small businesses.
Prices, money and jobs
The data behind most finance, retail and policy analyst work.
MoSPI eSankhyiki APIsGODL-India
Holds: the National Statistical Office’s macro indicators as four APIs in data.gov.in’s e-Sankhyiki catalog: the Consumer Price Index and the Periodic Labour Force Survey (monthly), National Accounts Statistics (quarterly) and the Time Use Survey, contributed by MoSPI and last updated on 24 July 2026.5
Try: pull CPI month by month for a few groups, such as food and housing, and chart which one is driving inflation.
RBI: Database on Indian EconomyRBI terms
Holds: the Reserve Bank’s DBIE: GDP, inflation, interest rates, money and bank credit, with statistics, publications, unit-level data and SDMX query sections.6
Licence: DBIE’s disclaimer says “Reproduction is permitted provided an acknowledgement of the primary source is made.”6
Try: plot the repo rate against bank credit growth, and find how many months credit takes to respond.
Mandi prices from AgmarknetGODL-India
Holds: Variety-wise Daily Market Prices Data of Commodity, from the Directorate of Marketing and Inspection through the Agmarknet portal: daily minimum, maximum and modal prices by state, district, market, commodity, variety and grade, updated on 21 Oct 2026.7
Try: track the tomato price gap between two nearby mandis through a year. Our Power BI roadmap builds a full dashboard on this file.
MoSPI microdataMoSPI policy
Holds: the MoSPI microdata catalog: 185 studies of unit-level survey data, including the Periodic Labour Force Survey, Household Consumption Expenditure surveys and the Annual Survey of Industries, as public use files. You sign in to download.8
Licence: MoSPI’s own policies, listed on the portal, including its Revised Guidelines for Statistical Data Dissemination, issued in line with NDSAP 2012.8 Publish your results, not the unit-level files.
Try: project 13 in our 15 data analyst projects works through youth unemployment in the PLFS, step by step.
People, health, crime and elections
Careful, official data, with caveats worth stating in your README.
Census 2011: Primary Census AbstractGODL-India
Holds: the Primary Census Abstract 2011, from the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner: households, population, children aged 0–6, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe population, literates, and workers by type, for India, with a file for each state.9
Try: the gap between male and female literacy, state by state, set against the share of main workers.
NFHS-5: district factsheetsGODL-India
Holds: the NFHS-5 district factsheets, 2019–21 (provisional), from the International Institute for Population Sciences: 122 columns per district, from schooling, electricity and health insurance to stunting and anaemia, in a 740 KB file. Figures in brackets rest on 25–49 unweighted cases, and an asterisk marks fewer than 25.10
Try: do districts where more women have 10 or more years of schooling have fewer stunted children? Flag the small-sample figures, and report a correlation, not a cause.
NCRB: Crime in IndiaGODL-India
Holds: the National Crime Records Bureau’s tables, such as District-wise Number of Cyber Crimes during 2022: cases under each section of the IT Act, by state and district, in a 128 KB file. Nagaland’s figures were marked as pending clarification.11
Try: which districts lead in identity theft, and does the ranking change when you divide by population from the Census?
Election Commission: Lok Sabha 2024GODL-India
Holds: the constituency-wise summary of the 2024 Lok Sabha election: electors, polling stations, nominations, contestants, forfeited deposits, voters and turnout for 542 constituencies, with Surat, won unopposed, left out. The file is 38 KB.12 ECI’s own statistical reports carry its copyright, so republish from the data.gov.in copy.
Try: is turnout lower where each polling station serves more electors?
India Post: pincode directoryGODL-India
Holds: the All India Pincode Directory, from the Department of Posts: every post office with its pincode, office type, delivery status, district, state, latitude and longitude, updated monthly (last on 10 Aug 2026). PIN codes date from 15 August 1972, and India has nine PIN regions.13
Try: use it as the lookup that turns any pincode in your data into a district, then count delivery post offices per lakh people with the Census.
Weather, air and farms
Long time series and live feeds.
CPCB: real-time air qualityGODL-India
Holds: the Central Pollution Control Board’s real-time Air Quality Index: hourly readings by monitoring station, with city, state, latitude and longitude, for pollutants including PM2.5, PM10, NO2, SO2, CO and ozone. Live readings come straight from the instruments and may contain errors.14
Try: it shows current readings, so build your own history: call the API every hour for a month with a short Python script. The collection pipeline is a data-engineering project in itself.
IMD: rainfall since 1901GODL · cite IMD
Holds: Sub Divisional Monthly Rainfall from 1901 to 2017 on data.gov.in, a 435 KB file with every month and season in millimetres;15 and IMD Pune’s daily gridded rainfall at 0.25°, on 135 × 129 grid points from 1901 to 2024, as yearly NetCDF files.16
Licence: the data.gov.in file is under GODL-India; the gridded data names no licence, and IMD asks you to cite Pai et al. (2014) if you use it.16
Try: from the daily grid, count the days above 100 mm in your district, decade by decade.
Kisan Call Centre transcriptsGODL-India
Holds: farmers’ questions to the Kisan Call Centre and the answers given, from the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, with state, district, block, season, crop and query type, by month; updated on 21 Oct 2026.17
Try: classify the questions by type, then build a small retrieval assistant that answers from past replies, and compare its answers with the experts’.
Beyond government: open data for AI
Two non-government sources with clear open licences, for sport and for Indian-language AI.
Cricsheet: IPL ball by ballODC-By
Holds: Cricsheet’s ball-by-ball match data, including 1,243 IPL matches. Most of it is under the Open Data Commons Attribution License, which asks you to credit Cricsheet in any public use.18
Try: which bowlers concede the fewest runs in overs 16–20, season by season?
MASSIVE and FLEURS: Indian languagesCC BY 4.0
Holds: two datasets on Hugging Face: Amazon’s MASSIVE, over a million utterances in 52 languages, including Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu; and Google’s FLEURS, speech in 102 languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. Both are under CC BY 4.0.19
Try: an intent classifier for Hindi and Tamil customer messages. On our program, Module 7 builds exactly this on MASSIVE, on every plan; see the curriculum.
Questions
Where can I find Indian datasets for data analysis?
Start with data.gov.in, India’s open government data platform, where most files are under GODL-India. Then try NITI Aayog’s NDAP for district-level data, RBI’s DBIE for the economy, and MoSPI’s eSankhyiki APIs and microdata portal for official statistics.
Can I use data.gov.in data for commercial projects?
Yes. GODL-India allows use, adaptation and publication for all lawful commercial and non-commercial purposes, as long as you publish an attribution statement crediting the provider, the source and the licence. It doesn’t cover personal information or official logos.
How do I cite a dataset from data.gov.in?
Use GODL-India’s format: the provider, year of publication, name of the data, the repository, the version or date (dd/mm) and the link, then “Published under Government Open Data License - India” with the licence’s link.
Which Indian dataset is good for a first project?
A small, clean file with a clear question: ECI’s 2024 Lok Sabha constituency summary (38 KB), NCRB’s district-wise cyber crimes for 2022 (128 KB) or IMD’s sub-divisional rainfall since 1901 (435 KB), all on data.gov.in.
Does RBI data have an open licence?
RBI’s Database on Indian Economy says reproduction is permitted provided the primary source is acknowledged. That’s permission with a condition rather than a named open licence, so credit the RBI and DBIE wherever you publish.
Can I use Kaggle datasets about India?
Check the licence on the dataset page and trace the file to its original publisher. When the original is official, download it from the source and credit that instead: it’s more current, and the licence is clear.
Sources
- data.gov.in, Government Open Data License – India, read 22 Oct 2026.
- data.gov.in, APIs, read 22 Oct 2026.
- data.gov.in, Metrics (as on September 2026; updated 12 Oct 2026).
- NITI Aayog, National Data and Analytics Platform, with its Policy and Terms & Conditions pages (linked in its footer), read 22 Oct 2026.
- data.gov.in, e-Sankhyiki (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation), updated 24 Jul 2026.
- Reserve Bank of India, Database on Indian Economy and its disclaimer, read 22 Oct 2026.
- data.gov.in, Variety-wise Daily Market Prices Data of Commodity (Directorate of Marketing and Inspection), updated 21 Oct 2026.
- MoSPI, Microdata catalog and Policies and Guidelines, read 22 Oct 2026.
- data.gov.in, Primary Census Abstract 2011 – India (Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India), updated 2 Jun 2025.
- data.gov.in, India Districts Factsheets of NFHS-5, 2019–2021 (Provisional) (IIPS), updated 11 Aug 2026.
- data.gov.in, District-wise Number of Cyber Crimes during 2022 (NCRB), published 12 Apr 2024.
- data.gov.in, Constituency (PC)-wise Summary during 2024 (Election Commission of India), updated 12 Feb 2025.
- data.gov.in, All India Pincode Directory till last month (Department of Posts), updated 10 Aug 2026.
- data.gov.in, Real time Air Quality Index from various locations (CPCB), updated 21 Oct 2026.
- data.gov.in, Sub Divisional Monthly Rainfall from 1901 to 2017 (IMD), read 22 Oct 2026.
- India Meteorological Department, Pune, High resolution 0.25 × 0.25 degree gridded rainfall data, read 22 Oct 2026.
- data.gov.in, Kisan Call Centre (KCC): transcripts of farmers’ queries and answers, updated 21 Oct 2026.
- Cricsheet, Licensing and Downloads, read 22 Oct 2026.
- Hugging Face, MASSIVE and FLEURS dataset cards, read 22 Oct 2026.
