datagovin-mcp

An MCP server that lets LLMs like Claude search and query India's Open Government Data platform (data.gov.in): GDP, trade, industry, agriculture and hundreds of thousands of other datasets published by Indian ministries.

"How did India's quarterly GDP growth move through COVID?" Claude searches the catalog, finds the MoSPI dataset, pulls the series and answers with real numbers, citing the source dataset and how current it is.

Tools

All tools are marked read-only.

Related MCP server: MoSPI MCP Server

Why this is more than an API wrapper

data.gov.in data is published as-is by each ministry, and it is messy in ways that trip up LLMs:

• Wide tables. The quarterly GDP dataset has ~150 columns (value_rs_in_crore___2011_12___q1, …). get_series parses the column names into (metric, period) pairs and returns a sorted series.

• Inconsistent naming within one dataset. The same dataset mixes ___q2 and __q3 ids and 2021-22 - Q2 vs 2021-22- Q3 names; another mixes Total - As on 31.03.2019 with Total as on 31.03.2018. The normalizer treats these as the same metric, so no periods get silently dropped.

• Token bloat. Catalog responses include every column of every dataset. Search results are trimmed to summaries, and wide tables return only dimension columns unless asked.

• Stale data. Many datasets stop years ago. Every summary reports the last update date and the period covered, and the server instructions ask the model to tell the user how current the data is.

• Reliability and safety. Responses are cached (TTL), HTTP 429/5xx errors are retried with exponential backoff, dataset ids are validated as UUIDs before any request, and the API key is never echoed in errors.

Setup

1. Get a free API key: register at data.gov.in and copy the key from your My Account page.

2. Install with uv:

git clone https://github.com/Oolrich/datagovin-mcp && cd datagovin-mcp
uv sync --extra dev

3. Check it works against the live API:

export DATA_GOV_IN_API_KEY=your-key
uv run python scripts/smoke_test.py

Use with Claude Desktop

Add this to claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config), then restart Claude:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "data-gov-in": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["--directory", "/absolute/path/to/datagovin-mcp", "run", "datagovin-mcp"],
      "env": { "DATA_GOV_IN_API_KEY": "your-key" }
    }
  }
}

Configuration

Development

uv run pytest

Tests run offline against a fake API built from real catalog responses, and they include an end-to-end test over the MCP protocol.

Limitations

• Search scans the newest catalog entries and matches keywords locally, because the catalog API has no full-text search. Use sector to reach older datasets.

• Filters are exact-match, as supported by the upstream API.

• Data is exactly as published by the source ministry. Check the dataset title and update date before relying on it.

Inspired by the datagovindia R package, rebuilt for LLM agents.

License

MIT