Building on the DIGIPIN ecosystem, the Department of Posts (DoP) under the Ministry of Communications has announced yet another “Address-as-a-Service” (AaaS) system titled DHRUVA, an acronym for Digital Hub for Reference and Unique Virtual Address.
The Ministry is currently accepting comments and feedback from the public and industry as part of its public consultation exercise. As of now, the draft Bill is unavailable on the India Post website; MediaNama has contacted [email protected] to obtain it. The last date to submit comments is December 31, 2025.
What is DHRUVA?
“DHRUVA is akin to people’s UPI IDs,” said a paper titled Decoding Digital Public Infrastructure: Scripting Inclusive Digital Futures, collectively authored by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and Data for Public Good. The paper draws parallels with other components of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure such as Aadhaar, NPCI’s UPI, and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). MediaNama had to rely on the ORF paper to understand DHRUVA, since official sources from India Post are not available, including older documents cited in ORF’s publication.
“This digital address system will support the traditional addressing system by enabling users to depict and share their addresses in a standardised and geo-coded format,” the paper notes, citing a DoP document published in May 2025 titled DHRUVA: Digital Hub for Reference and Unique Virtual Address. The system is expected to “enhance address precision, reduce errors in communication and service delivery.”
Under the recently operationalised Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, “personal data” refers to any data about an individual that can help identify them, including their address, which is considered personally identifiable information. The press release, therefore, states that DHRUVA will use a “consent-based mechanism for generation, exchange, validation, access, and use of address information.”
The draft Bill aims to operationalise the DHRUVA system through the following components:
- Digital Address Identifiers (DAI)
- Addresses and postcodes
- Generation and use of address identifiers
- Validation of address information associated with an address identifier
- Registration of Address Service Providers (ASPs)
- Authorisation of Address Validation Agencies (AVAs)
- Creation of a national Network Administrator
- Establishment of a governance architecture to support India’s DPI vision for address management
- Grievance redress, adjudication, and penalties
What was DIGIPIN
The Digital Postal Index Number (DIGIPIN) is a geo-coded, grid-based address system designed to simplify address management, especially in areas without well-defined addressing, such as rural regions and densely populated urban clusters where roads and local infrastructure may lack clarity.
Developed by India Post in collaboration with IIT Hyderabad and…
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