Culture & heritage

Open-source research lab at IIT Madras building datasets, machine translation engines, and speech models for 22 Indian languages

Organisation TechnologyCulture & heritage India, Global

V. Krishna's open-source Kannada-English dictionary — 247K entries with full-text search, built by Zerodha's tech team and freely accessible to all

Tool Culture & heritageTechnology India, Karnataka

Open-source web platform for georeferencing, curating, and overlaying high-resolution historical maps from digital library IIIF repositories

Tool Culture & heritageTechnology Global, India

Preserving and promoting Kerala's local culture and heritage through digital archiving, multimedia storytelling, research, and community engagement

Organisation Culture & heritageMedia India, Kerala

Non-partisan citizen action to improve governance and civic participation in Bengaluru.

Organisation CitiesGovernance India, Karnataka

Open-access geospatial dataset and polygon boundaries of historical polities and states across the globe from 3400 BCE to the present

Data source Culture & heritageGovernance Global, India

Community and event space in Bengaluru — art, music, science, learning, and culture, plus Makkala Masti outreach for rural government school children

Organisation EducationCulture & heritage India, Karnataka

Massive digitised collection of Indian books in multiple languages — part of the Million Book Project, hosted on Internet Archive with millions of free volumes

Archive Culture & heritageEducation India

Interactive basin-scale river maps, ecological storytelling, and historical baseline documentation for living river recovery

Publication WaterEnvironment India, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu

Research organisation conserving medicinal plants and documenting the knowledge and practice of Indian health traditions

Organisation HealthEnvironment India, Karnataka

Award-winning food publication celebrating regional cuisines and home cooks — building an open-source archive of India's heirloom recipes

Publication Culture & heritageMedia India

Ministry of Tourism's annual statistics — foreign tourist arrivals, foreign exchange earnings, domestic tourism visits, and state-wise tourism infrastructure

Data source EconomyCulture & heritage India

Digital archival and preservation of Indic language cultural artefacts — books, publications, and documents — available for free and open access

Organisation Culture & heritageMedia India, Kerala

Preserving tangible and intangible heritage in Rajasthan — documenting and reviving 400 traditional hand block prints through the Marwar Block Print Project

Organisation Culture & heritage India, Rajasthan

Food-systems storytelling, local producer networks, and community-led action for regional food cultures.

Organisation CitiesGovernance India

Community art space in Calicut operating from a repurposed heritage go-down — hosting conversations, exhibitions, workshops, and artist residencies by the beach

Community Culture & heritage India, Kerala

Builds a searchable, machine-readable repository of India's digitised manuscripts and inscriptions for research and public access

Organisation Culture & heritageTechnology India

Odissi dance preservation and Food Forest support near Bengaluru.

Organisation CitiesGovernance India, Karnataka

Crowd-sourced directory of public community spaces across India — libraries, makerspaces, museums, science centres and galleries

Directory Culture & heritageEducation India

Open, crowd-sourced historical world map documenting geographic and political boundaries across centuries using OpenStreetMap infrastructure

Data source Culture & heritageDemography Global, India

Offline-oriented tools for subtitling, organising media and documenting oral knowledge in Indigenous and low-resourced languages

Tool Culture & heritageTechnology India, Global

Open-source document management system that transforms physical scans and digital documents into a searchable archive with OCR and automated tagging

Tool TechnologyTransparency Global, India

A publication on political economy with rigorous writing on economics, history, policy, and politics.

Publication EconomyGovernance Global

Funds and connects Indian projects creating public commons, institutions, community spaces, and lasting social value

Organisation PhilanthropyTechnology India

Builds open Kannada language technology, literary research tools, and freely accessible digital collections of books and periodicals

Organisation Culture & heritageTechnology India, Karnataka

Research-based public engagement at the intersection of sciences, engineering, art, and design — part of the global Science Gallery Network

Organisation EducationCulture & heritage India, Karnataka

Large-scale historical database systematically coding the social, political, and institutional evolution of human societies over 5000 years

Data source Culture & heritageDemography Global, India

Arts education and socio-emotional learning for children from underserved communities.

Organisation CitiesGovernance India, Delhi, Maharashtra, Punjab, Bihar, Karnataka

Collective wisdom through participatory methods, dialogue, and community process design.

Organisation CitiesGovernance India, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh

Open-source multilingual text-to-speech model for Indian languages, enabling natural voice synthesis across regional languages and dialects

Tool TechnologyCulture & heritage India, Global

Research unit polling, discourse analysis, and a public archive of questions tracking young India's opinions and cultural shifts

Organisation Culture & heritageMedia India

UNESCO's flagship annual report on global education access, learning quality and financing for SDG 4

Publication EducationCulture & heritage Global, India

A magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world, focused on practical essays across economics, policy, and culture.

Publication EconomyGovernance Global