OpenCity
OpenCity is a Bengaluru-based urban data portal, run by the Oorvani Foundation in collaboration with DataMeet, that collects, organises and publishes datasets, maps and documents about Indian cities for journalists, researchers, officials and citizens. It is not a newsroom and it does not sell data; it is a public repository whose mission, in its own words, is to bring visibility and transparency into urban local governance and to enable data-based decision-making in cities. At the time of its well-documented redesign work in 2020, the portal held close to 534 datasets and more than 1,300 documents, was visited by more than 50,000 unique users a month, and covered information from cities including Bengaluru and Chennai. For a directory of Indian media services, OpenCity matters because so much urban journalism — on water, transport, budgets, elections and neighbourhood change — begins with exactly the kind of city data it keeps in one place.
Overview and mission
OpenCity's premise is that Indian cities generate enormous amounts of public data — budgets, ward maps, bus routes, lake surveys, election results, water and sewerage networks — but that the data is scattered across municipal websites, PDFs and departmental silos in formats few people can use. The portal gathers that material into a single catalogue built on CKAN, the open-source open data portal software, where each dataset can be searched, previewed and downloaded in formats such as CSV, KML, XLSX, PDF and TXT. SVP India's profile of the Oorvani Foundation describes Open City as an urban data platform supported by the trust alongside Co Media Lab, a resource centre for collaborative projects and citizen media. The portal's own writing about metadata — the information that describes each dataset — explains why this curation matters: without documentation of contents, context, quality and accessibility, a dataset is a file nobody can confidently reuse; with it, the same file becomes a reporting and planning resource.
Origins: Oorvani Foundation and DataMeet
OpenCity is described consistently across sources as a collaboration between the Oorvani Foundation and DataMeet, and as a platform hosted and developed by the two. Oorvani Foundation is a Bengaluru non-profit working on open knowledge platforms intended, in SVP India's summary, to help catalyse better cities. Its best-known initiative is Citizen Matters, an independent news medium focused on cities and citizens, with reporting from professional journalists, practitioners and citizen reporters, described by SVP as award-winning and known for in-depth investigative stories, analysis and data journalism. That sibling relationship is important to understanding OpenCity: the portal grew inside an organisation that publishes urban journalism, so its data collection has always been shaped by the questions journalists and engaged citizens actually ask about their cities. DataMeet, the other founding partner, is India's well-known community of data enthusiasts and practitioners; its involvement is visible in the portal's community-driven development, including volunteer sprints with groups such as DataKind Bengaluru.
What the portal contains
The catalogue's range is best conveyed by example. For Bengaluru, datasets visible on the portal include ward and revenue maps — revenue maps for different hoblis, parcelled into survey numbers — maps of lakes and a Bengaluru Lake Assets survey, slum maps, CCTV camera locations crowdsourced from OpenStreetMap, transport network maps at taluk level, cycle ride data from the Cycle2Work initiative, water supply and sewerage line maps from the city's water board, electricity utility data including electric vehicle consumption figures, and Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike material such as Fix My Street pothole data. For Chennai, the catalogue includes air quality reports, water bodies census data, wetlands data, slum locations and boundaries, health centre lists and maps, shelters, burial grounds and crematoriums, stormwater drain maps, solid waste management data, sewerage capacity and treatment plant information, Mass Rapid Transit System maps, education data from the DISE and UDISE+ systems, and Greater Chennai Corporation budget documents. Reports from research organisations sit alongside raw data, including work on climate-resilient cities and on how water flows through Bengaluru.
How the data is organised
OpenCity is organised as a data catalogue rather than a publication. Datasets are grouped by city, by theme — governance, mobility and city services among them — by contributing organisation and by format and licence, and each entry carries the metadata needed to judge whether it can be trusted and reused. Contributors include government bodies, research organisations and Citizen Matters itself, whose organisation page on the portal lists datasets such as the lake assets survey, election surveys, CCTV mapping and urban ecology material. Licences vary by dataset, with some material published under Creative Commons non-commercial terms and some in the public domain, so users are expected to check the licence attached to each dataset before republication. An API provides programmatic access to the registry for developers. This structure — boring as it may sound — is the portal's real product: provenance, format and licence clarity are what separate a usable open data portal from a folder of files.
The 2020 redesign with CivicDataLab
In March 2020, as part of a Tech4Dev cohort, Oorvani Foundation began a redesign of OpenCity in collaboration with CivicDataLab, the New Delhi data lab profiled separately in this directory. The stated purpose was to make the platform more accessible and user-friendly, and the project became a small case study in designing civic technology with its users. CivicDataLab's team wrote about studying the portal's analytics — finding roughly sixty thousand new users a month in one account and more than fifty thousand unique monthly users in another — interviewing stakeholders and users, and asking two questions that shaped the work: who is seeing this data, and how is it useful to them? Their analytics writing profiled the portal's most devoted user, whose visits beginning in April 2018 ran to hundreds of sessions and dozens of hours spent on ward maps, street maps, election results and traffic signal pages, with occasional visits to Chennai Corporation maps. The redesign process, documented in posts about design research, metadata creation and participatory ideation workshops, treated OpenCity explicitly as India's largest city-based open data platform and tried to design for citizens, government officials and journalists alike.
Community development and data sprints
OpenCity has also been built in the open, with volunteers. A 2018 collaboration documented by DataKind Bengaluru set out to compute a liveability index for Bengaluru at neighbourhood level, working through questions such as how green a neighbourhood is, its access to parks and playgrounds, polling stations, distance to the nearest police station, civic engagement measured by voter turnout, and proximity to metro and BMTC bus stations. Volunteer opportunities in that sprint covered the portal's whole pipeline: scraping and collecting data from sources including OpenStreetMap, the national data portal, the Bengaluru transport utility, Open Budgets India and OpenAQ; collating and cleaning multiple sources; mapping data points to Bengaluru wards; building pipelines to keep the data current; and designing how indicators should be presented to citizens, officials and journalists. That a data portal recruits help this way is a marker of the open data community culture in Bengaluru, and it helps explain the catalogue's eclecticism — datasets arrive because someone in the community needed them.
How journalists and citizens use OpenCity
For journalists, OpenCity functions as a first stop for the factual substrate of a city story: the ward a neighbourhood falls in, the official boundary of a lake, the budget line for a municipal service, the locations of health centres, shelters or stormwater drains, and the historical election geography against which a new result should be read. Citizen Matters' own data journalism draws on this ecosystem, and the portal's organisation pages show the newsroom contributing datasets back into the commons it reports from. For citizens and resident groups, the same material supports more practical engagement — checking a corporation budget, mapping a local service or preparing evidence for a civic demand, as in the citizen's charter material for Chennai's Pallikaranai watershed hosted on the portal. For researchers and civic technologists, the downloadable, documented formats and the API make the catalogue usable as infrastructure for studies and applications rather than as a set of one-off downloads. The redesign research found exactly this mix — heavy repeat users treating the portal as a working reference for their own city.
Geographic footprint: Bengaluru, Chennai and beyond
Bengaluru is the portal's home and its deepest coverage area, reflecting Oorvani Foundation's base in Karnataka and the city's unusually active open data community. Chennai is the second major focus, with extensive Corporation, water, education, health and environment datasets, consistent with Citizen Matters' own reporting presence there. Beyond the two, the catalogue reaches other cities and state-level material — Tamil Nadu-wide datasets on wetlands, water bodies and education are prominent, and governance and budget documents extend the portal's usefulness past municipal boundaries. The portal's ambitions, expressed during its redesign, were to keep growing to cover more information and data from more Indian cities; its structure, in which any organisation can contribute datasets under clear licences, is designed to let that expansion happen incrementally rather than through a single central collection effort.
Role in the Indian news ecosystem
OpenCity occupies a quiet but distinctive place in India's media ecosystem: it is the data layer beneath urban journalism. National debates about Indian cities — flooding in Chennai, water stress in Bengaluru, air quality, public transport, municipal finance — are routinely argued from anecdote because official city data is hard to obtain in usable form. A portal that has spent years assembling ward maps, budgets, utility networks and survey data, with documentation and licences attached, gives reporters and citizens a shared factual starting point. Its institutional home matters too: because Oorvani Foundation also publishes Citizen Matters, OpenCity demonstrates a model in which a news organisation builds public data infrastructure as part of its civic mission, rather than treating data purely as a private reporting asset. In a directory concerned with how Indian news is made, that model — open data as a public good maintained by a media non-profit — deserves recording alongside commercial agencies and measurement firms.
How to access and use OpenCity
OpenCity is accessed through its website at opencity.in, with the data catalogue itself at data.opencity.in. Users can browse datasets by city, theme or contributing organisation, search the catalogue, preview files and download them in the formats each dataset offers, and developers can query the catalogue through its API. Before reusing material, users should read the individual dataset's page for its source, date, documentation and licence, since terms differ across the catalogue, and credit the contributing organisation where required. There is no paywall and no account is needed for ordinary use, in keeping with the portal's open knowledge mission. For journalists encountering it for the first time, the practical advice from the portal's own history is to start with the maps and budget datasets for the city being covered — they are the resources its most loyal users returned to hundreds of times, and they remain the quickest way to ground a city story in verifiable fact.
