GDAL

GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) is the Swiss Army knife of geospatial data — the invisible engine underneath QGIS, Google Earth Engine, PostGIS, and virtually every other GIS tool. It provides command-line utilities that convert between any geospatial format (gdal_translate, ogr2ogr), reproject coordinates, merge and crop rasters, build virtual mosaics, and process data at scale. For Indian researchers, GDAL is essential infrastructure: convert Survey of India shapefiles from an obscure projection to WGS84, merge hundreds of Sentinel-2 scenes into a single mosaic, clip a global climate dataset to India’s boundary, or convert between GeoJSON and SHP formats. The command-line interface makes it scriptable for batch processing. Free, open-source, and actively maintained.