Accessible public information can strengthen research, encourage informed public discourse, and enable evidence-based policymaking, ultimately improving the lives of ordinary citizens. 

However, making data public does not automatically make it useful. Much of it remains fragmented across different portals, buried in lengthy documents, or available in inconsistent formats that make it difficult to find, interpret, and apply. 

But a new frontier technology is stepping in. Startup FACTLY’s projects, Dataful, Tagore AI, and GoPie, address different parts of this accessibility challenge. 

They accelerate data preparation, enabling conversational access and making analysis available to a wider range of users.

Making public data available, usable and accessible

Public data availability and usability are essential to building a more informed, inclusive, and effective society. When government data is openly accessible and easy to understand, it empowers researchers, journalists, businesses, civil society organisations, and citizens to identify challenges, uncover trends, and develop solutions grounded in evidence. 

It enables policymakers to make better-informed decisions, helps communities hold institutions accountable, and encourages innovation by allowing entrepreneurs and researchers to build on existing information rather than starting from scratch. However, data is only valuable when people can find, access, interpret, and use it effectively. 

Dataful improves the availability and usability of public data by transforming fragmented government information and regulatory disclosures into clean, standardised datasets. It offers more than 18,000 datasets across over 50 sectors. AI is extensively used in internal extraction, cleaning, metadata and standardisation workflows, while internal teams review source accuracy, definitions, units and comparability. 

Making public data accessible is essential for fostering transparency, accountability, and informed decision-making. When information collected by public institutions is readily available, researchers, journalists, civil society organisations, businesses, and citizens can better understand societal challenges, evaluate government initiatives, and identify opportunities for improvement. 

Tagore AI improves accessibility by enabling conversational research across approximately 2.5 million official documents dating back to the 1950s. Users can discover information, explore historical developments and trace answers to sources. Together, these products build a trusted public data and knowledge layer that makes frontier models more useful, faster and more powerful, while reducing the need to repeatedly locate and process raw information. 

Making public data usable is as important as making it accessible. Data that is scattered across multiple platforms, buried in lengthy documents, or published in inconsistent formats can be difficult to interpret and apply, limiting its potential to drive meaningful change. Usable data is well-organised, machine-readable, clearly documented, and easy to analyse, enabling researchers, policymakers, businesses, and citizens to extract insights and translate them into action. 

GoPie strengthens usability by providing an analytics layer over Dataful’s public data and datasets that organisations already possess. It combines structured data with supporting documents and dictionaries, allowing users to ask questions in ordinary language and generate analyses, dashboards and narrative reports for human review. 

The impact of making data accessible

The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) releases data highlighting dowry deaths. However, using AI, it is possible to observe trends in the dataset: a decline in dowry deaths from 8,618 cases in 2011 to 5,737 in 2024. The frontier technology translates annual figures into a stark reality: nearly 16 women die every day in dowry-related cases. It breaks down investigation backlogs, showing 2,765 cases pending at the end of 2024.

Through key statistics, comparisons, and visualisations, it turns complex public data into meaningful insights that anyone can understand.

Dataful reaches more than 60,000 registered users, including government officials, students, academics, journalists, policy researchers, consultants, businesses and development-sector professionals. This is a concrete indicator of direct reach within FACTLY’s broader mission to make public data meaningful. 

Tagore AI helps users find and understand official documentary evidence, while GoPie enables people with sector expertise to analyse datasets without needing programming skills. Together, the products reduce barriers between public information and the people who can use it for research, reporting, planning and decision-making.

The benefits extend beyond platform users through the secondary research and communication their work produces. Dataful’s documented mentions include academic research on electoral democracy, digital financial literacy and industrial disasters, alongside a welfare-rights handbook and public-interest reporting. These uses demonstrate how improving the accessibility and usability of public data supports a wider evidence ecosystem. Research findings and published analysis can feed into policy decisions, policy discussions and institutional decisions, reaching readers, practitioners and communities who may never use the products directly. This secondary reach multiplies the value of the direct user base.

Scaling the mission of making public data meaningful 

FACTLY’s tangible outcomes can be understood through improvements in the availability, accessibility and usability of public information. Across a registered-user base exceeding 60,000, avoiding even modest amounts of repeated preparation can translate into millions of researcher-hours saved. 

Usability is demonstrated by what people create with these resources. Dataful’s documented mentions show its use in academic papers, a welfare-rights handbook and reporting across several public-interest subjects. Such reuse turns public information into research, explanations and evidence that can inform public debate and policy discussions. GoPie extends this capability by enabling users to analyse existing datasets and produce dashboards and reports through natural-language requests. 

Making public data accessible, usable, and interoperable can unlock enormous opportunities for India. When researchers, startups, businesses, and citizens can easily access reliable government data, they can develop solutions grounded in real-world needs. Scaling AI models trained on diverse Indian datasets can further accelerate this impact, from helping farmers make better decisions using weather and crop information to improving healthcare access, personalising education, and making public services more efficient. 

Models that understand India’s languages, regional contexts, and socioeconomic diversity can bring these benefits to underserved communities, not just major cities. Shared data infrastructure and reusable AI models can also lower development costs, enabling smaller startups and local innovators to build impactful solutions. Achieving this requires high-quality data, accessible computing resources, strong privacy safeguards, and responsible governance. By treating public data and AI capabilities as foundational infrastructure, India can foster innovation, improve decision-making, strengthen digital inclusion, and create scalable solutions for millions of people.