Why Indian Address Parsing Is Broken (And What I Built to Fix It)

Every country has address quirks. India's are in a league of their own. There is no universal street numbering system. The same city can appear as "Bengaluru", "Bangalore", "BLR" or "ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು" depending on who's writing it. Addresses frequently include landmarks instead of street names.. "Near SBI ATM, Opposite Ganesh Temple" is a real, functional address in India. And there are 23,915 pincodes covering a population of 1.4 billion people. If you are building e-commerce, logistics, fintech or govtech in India, you have hit this wall. The existing options are either paid APIs (Google or India Post's SOAP service), patented solutions (Delhivery) or rolling your own regex and hoping for the best. I did my research.. there is libpostal — the go-to open source address parser but it doesn't handle Indian formats well. So I built bharataddress. It is an open source Python library that parses unstructured Indian addresses into structured JSON, entirely offline. No API keys, no network calls, no