Department of Post releases beta version of digital National Addressing Grid
It is designed as “a permanent digital infrastructure” which will not change with changes in the names of the state, city or locality, or changes in the road network.
The Department of Post has released a beta version of the National Addressing Grid — DIGIPIN (Digital Postal Index Number) — to take public feedback until September 22, the ministry of communications announced on Monday.
The system, developed by the postal department and IIT Hyderabad, will divide the entire country, including the Exclusive Economic Zone, into 4mX4m units, each of which will be assigned a unique 10-digit alphanumeric code derived from the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the unit. This code will then be used as the “offline addressing reference” for any specific location within the DIGIPIN system.
“The DIGIPIN layer will act as the addressing reference system which will be available offline and can be used for locating addresses in a logical manner with directional properties built into it due to the logical naming pattern followed in its construction. DIGIPIN can also be used for emergency rescue operations and national disasters such as floods,” the postal department’s technical document, dated April 2024, stated.
The DIGIPIN will be in the public domain because no private address data is stored against the DIGIPIN grid value, “there is no privacy concern associated with DIGIPIN being in public domain”, the technical documents said.
It is designed as “a permanent digital infrastructure” which will not change with changes in the names of the state, city or locality, or changes in the road network.
How will the DIGIPIN code be assigned?
DIGIPIN will use one of the 16 alphanumeric symbols (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,G,J,K,L,M,P,W,X). The entire country will first be divided into 16 regions (4X4), including the maritime EEZ (up to 200 nautical miles from the coastline). DIGPIN, the department said, can thus be used to provide addresses for Indian assets in the sea such as oil rigs, future artificial islands, etc.
The first character for the DIGIPIN will identify that one of these 16 regions. India, under this scheme, is covered only by eight regions and thus can be labelled by digits 2-9, and the ‘level 1’ grid lines will not cut through cities with very large populations.
Each of these 16 regions will be divided into 16 units to get ‘level 2’ partition to create 256 subregions. The second character in DIGIPIN will give the location of this ‘level 2’ partition in the first region. This process will be done eight more time to get 16^10 DIGIPINs for the 4 metre by 4 metre unit.
This means that the geographical coordinates of the place can be calculated from the DIGIPIN.
At ‘level 10’, the 4mX4m units will be almost rectangular but dimensions would vary based on the latitude due to shape of the earth.
“This system will act as a strong and robust pillar of Geospatial Governance, leading to enhancements in public service delivery, faster emergency response and a significant boost to logistics efficiency,” the ministry said.