Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India
India's national open data portal, data.gov.in, brings together hundreds of thousands of datasets published by central ministries and state departments, mostly as CSV, with APIs for many of them. A huge source of real public data for practising cleaning, joining and analysis.
354,995
data.gov.in · Sept 2026
12,524
data.gov.in · Sept 2026
327,353
data.gov.in · Sept 2026
12.9 million
data.gov.in · Sept 2026
Platform
Other
Government of India
Browse in an hour, one dataset is a project
All
Free
What it is
The Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India at data.gov.in is the single point of access for open datasets published by Government of India ministries, departments and organisations, and by state governments. Data is grouped into catalogues, and each catalogue holds resources, usually one file or API per period or region.
As shown on the home page in September 2026, the platform lists 354,995 resources in 12,524 catalogues. Most resources are CSV files (327,353), with others in JSON, Excel, XML and other formats. The page also reports 12.9 million downloads.
What kind of data is there
Coverage follows what departments publish: agriculture, commodity prices, health facilities, education, energy generation, transport, rainfall, finance and much more, often broken down by state or district and by month or year. Quality and freshness vary by publisher, and the platform says content is owned by the respective ministry, state, department or organisation and licensed under the Government Open Data License India.
Downloads and APIs
You can download files directly from a resource page. Many resources also have an API, which you call with a personal API key from your account. That is useful when you want a script or small app that stays up to date rather than a one-off CSV.
Is it worth your time?
Yes, if you treat it as practice for real data work. Government datasets are rarely tidy: column names change between years, states are spelled differently, numbers arrive as text with footnotes, and similar data sits in several catalogues. Cleaning and joining these is exactly the skill a data science learner needs and toy datasets never teach.
How long it takes
Finding a good dataset takes an hour of searching and filtering by sector or ministry. A proper analysis, from download to cleaned data to charts and a written conclusion, is a weekend project.
Prerequisites
pandas for loading and cleaning, and a plotting library. For APIs, basic HTTP requests in Python.
Free or paid?
Free to browse and download. Registration is only needed for features such as API keys.
Common questions
How do I find good datasets? Filter by sector, then prefer catalogues with many resources and recent updates, so you can compare across time.
Can I use it in a portfolio project? Yes. Cite the catalogue and the licence, and describe the cleaning steps you took.
Best for: learners who want real public data at scale, and anyone building projects on Indian economic, social or agricultural data.
Ready to start?
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