I did engineering, but I'd never really call myself a developer. I was always more drawn to how policy shapes technology than to building the technology itself. For a long time, those two worlds felt separate. Then AI happened, and suddenly the gap between "I wonder if this exists" and "I just built it" collapsed to a weekend.
In 2025, I attended IndiaFOSS for the first time. I'd been to a lot of policy and tech conferences, but this one felt different; there was a genuine energy in the room. People were passionate about what they were building, and more importantly, why. Submitting this proposal for IndiaFOSS 2026 feels like a full-circle moment.
For the last few months, I’ve been trying to understand how India's government actually built its digital infrastructure. I was more interested in the ground-level account of what worked, what didn't, and who made it happen rather than press releases and policy documents. That trail led me to the NIC Informatics newsletter.
The National Informatics Centre has been the invisible backbone of India's digital government for over 50 years — election results, land records, passport systems, Aarogya Setu. For 34 of those years, NIC published a quarterly newsletter called Informatics, documenting what it built and how. 3,865 articles. 1,852 authors. Public servants from every Indian state writing about the systems that now run the country.
The only problem was that all of it was sitting in unsearchable PDFs on a government website. You couldn't Ctrl+F it. You couldn't search across issues. You couldn't find stories and correlations unless you knew exactly where to look. So I decided to build it.
"The concept of 'Knowledge Sharing' plays a pivotal role, not just to avoid a re-invention of the wheel but also to ensure an optimisation of resources."
— NIC Informatics, January 2006 [found the quote through the archive :) ]
I spent a few weekends with some open source tools and cheap LLM APIs (no serious coding involved) and tried to build an archive that might change that. Here’s a glimpse of a few things I found that surprised me:
- The 1991 election: NIC engineers built India's first satellite-linked, real-time, TV-broadcast election result system for the 10th Lok Sabha. The people who built it wrote about how they did it in the October 1992 issue.
- There are 73+ articles tracing India's land records computerisation from 1992 pilot programs all the way through to Digital India's DILRMP. If you're a researcher studying land rights, agrarian policy, or the history of property digitisation in India, this is the most complete primary source that exists.
- 1852 unique authors spread across different states. Engineers and officers from every Indian state contributed writing in their own words about what they built in their districts. That kind of ground-level documentation of public sector technology work doesn't exist anywhere else.
This talk is the story of how I stumbled into the project, what I found when I got there, and what I think it means. The code is commoditised. Curiosity is the hard part. A lot of public data in India is technically available, but available and usable are very different things. With the tools we now have, there's no excuse for the gap between the two.
