Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming how we live and work — writing emails, generating art, and answering questions in seconds. But beyond these high-tech breakthroughs, a quieter shift is underway. One that isn’t about creating something new but about unlocking what already exists.

Across India, decades of public data from parliamentary debates and census records to ministry reports sit scattered in PDFs, scanned documents, and hard-to-navigate archives. Technically public, yet practically out of reach for most people.

For journalists chasing facts, researchers building studies, or citizens trying to understand policy, accessing this information has long meant hours and sometimes days of manual searching.

This is the gap that Factly, a Hyderabad-based research and data journalism organisation, has been working to bridge since 2016. And today, with its AI-powered tools Dataful and Tagore AI, it is rethinking what access to public data can actually look like.

A vision rooted in transparency

Factly’s story begins with one man’s conviction that transparency is the foundation of democracy. 

Rakesh Dubbudu, 42, an engineer-turned-transparency-campaigner, has been on this journey for years. Following his engineering education, he became deeply involved with India’s Right to Information (RTI) movement, working tirelessly to hold government systems accountable. This work exposed him to both the potential and the frustrations of public data.

"I was part of the larger Right to Information movement," Rakesh tells The Better India."That’s where I realised the immense power of information and how inaccessible it really was for most people."

Even when data was technically available, it was often fragmented, inconsistently formatted, or buried in scanned documents. For citizens, researchers, and even journalists, this made meaningful use difficult.

So in 2016, Rakesh started Factly with a simple goal: make public data understandable and usable.

What began as explainers and fact-checking gradually evolved into something deeper. Behind the scenes, the team — now 30 people across research, data, and technology — started building a structured ecosystem of public data.

Parliamentary records, ministry reports, economic indicators — cleaned, standardised, and stitched together over time.

"As technology evolved, we saw an opportunity to do more," Rakesh says. "We realised we could make public data significantly easier for people to access and use."

This realisation led to the creation of Tagore AI and Dataful, two AI-driven tools designed to........

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