An Indian address is a sequence of increasingly large places with no fixed number of steps between them. There is no national street naming convention, no national building numbering scheme, and no requirement that any particular level appear. What holds an Indian address together is the six digit PIN code and the state.
This article describes the Indian address format, how CDQ represents it in the CDQ address model, and which reference data CDQ maintains for India. It is the reference for anyone mapping Indian business partner data into CDQ, or consuming curated Indian addresses from CDQ.
In this article, you will understand:
- How an Indian address is structured, and why the number of levels varies
- How each Indian level maps to a concept in the CDQ address model, and which SAP field it reaches
- What a PIN code encodes, and what it can and cannot be used to check
- Which reference data CDQ maintains for India, and what the published values look like
- Where the current CDQ coverage for India is incomplete
Available in:
- CDQ Wiki: business partner metadata for India: browse the published Indian metadata
An Indian address is written smallest first and is built from whatever levels the place happens to have. A city address may have a house number, a street, an area and a city. A rural address may have a house number, a village, a post office, a sub-district and a district, with no street at all.
What is specific to India is mostly the absence of the conventions other countries have, rather than an unusual structure:
| Specific to India | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| There is no national street naming or building numbering convention | 12-3-456, H.No. 5-9-30/1/A, Plot No 45 and B-12 are all normal, and a hyphen is not a range |
| The number of levels varies with the place | a value cannot be assigned to a level by its position, because the level above it may be absent |
| Landmarks are part of how addresses are written | Near Fire Brigade is genuinely how the place is found, and is not postal data |
| Many cities and several states have been renamed | the historic name is not a misspelling, and both forms sit in the same master data |
| The state is written on the address and the PIN encodes the geography | unlike Germany, France or Portugal, the top level subdivision is part of an Indian address |
| Level | Name | What it is | Used to address mail | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | state or union territory | top level subdivision, 28 states and 8 union territories | yes | Maharashtra |
| 2 | district | subdivision of a state, and the level most administration runs on | in rural addresses | Pune |
| 3 | tehsil, taluk or mandal | sub-district, named differently in different states | in rural addresses | Haveli |
| 4 | city, town or village | the settlement | yes | Pune |
| 5 | locality, area, sector or colony | the named part of the settlement | yes | Koregaon Park |
| 6 | street, road or lane | the street, where there is one | where there is one | North Main Road |
Below that comes the plot or house number, then the building, wing, floor and flat.
India is therefore the opposite case to Germany, France and Portugal. There, the top level subdivision is absent from the address and has to be derived; here it is written on every address and is one of the two values that make the address resolvable.
A complete urban address:
Acme Industries Private Limited
Unit 402, 4th Floor, Sunrise Tower
North Main Road, Koregaon Park
Pune, Maharashtra 411001Six digits, and the digits are not arbitrary:
| Digits | Identifies |
|---|---|
| 1 | postal zone, from 1 in the north to 8 in the south, with 9 for army post offices |
| 1 to 2 | postal circle, which corresponds broadly to a state |
| 3 | sorting district within that circle |
| 4 to 6 | the delivery post office |
The first two digits are therefore a usable cross-check on the state, and the first three on the district. No Indian PIN code begins with a zero, so a PIN that is five digits long has lost a digit somewhere other than the front.
Near Fire Brigade, Opposite Big Bazaar, Behind Reliance Fresh and Beside HDFC Bank are extremely common in Indian addresses and are genuinely how people find the place. They are not part of the postal address, they do not identify a location on their own, and they change when the business they refer to closes. They belong in an address supplement, never in the street field.
Many cities have been renamed. Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, Calcutta became Kolkata, Bangalore became Bengaluru, Poona became Pune, Baroda became Vadodara, Trivandrum became Thiruvananthapuram, Gurgaon became Gurugram. Master data holds both, sometimes in the same file, and the historic name is not a misspelling.
States have been renamed and redrawn. Orissa became Odisha, Uttaranchal became Uttarakhand, Pondicherry became Puducherry. In 2020 Jammu and Kashmir was divided and Ladakh created, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli was merged with Daman and Diu. An address written before a change carries the older unit, and it was correct when it was written.
A planned city numbers its areas, not its streets. Sector 62, Noida, Phase 3, DLF City, Block C, Vasant Kunj. The sector or phase is the area, not a street and not a building.
Bengaluru numbers its streets in a grid. 5th Main, 4th Cross, 2nd Block, Jayanagar is four levels of grid reference, and every one of the numbers belongs to a street name rather than to a building.
House numbers have no national form. 12-3-456, H.No. 5-9-30/1/A, Plot No 45, Flat 402 and B-12 are all normal. A hyphen in an Indian house number is not a range.
The road word varies by language. Road, Marg, Path, Rasta, Sadak, Gali and Chowk all appear, sometimes in the same city, and Marg is as common as Road in Delhi and Mumbai.
Pune is a city, a district and, before the states were reorganised, other things besides. Mumbai is a city and two districts. A name on its own does not say which level it belongs to, which is why the state and the PIN code have to travel with it.
The CDQ address model has two parallel hierarchies. Administrative areas represent the political containers, typed REGION and COUNTY. Localities represent the places themselves, typed CITY, DISTRICT, QUARTER or BLOCK. Streets are held as thoroughfares with the number in its own field, and buildings, wings, floors and flats as typed premises.
India maps as follows:
| Indian level | CDQ concept | Type | SAP field |
|---|---|---|---|
| state or union territory | administrative area, level 1 | REGION | region |
| district | administrative area, level 2 | COUNTY | county |
| city, town or village | locality, level 1 | CITY | city |
| locality, area, sector, colony or block | locality, level 2 | DISTRICT | district |
| industrial estate or industrial area | thoroughfare | INDUSTRIAL_ZONE | appended to district |
| street, road, marg or lane | thoroughfare | STREET | street |
| plot or house number | thoroughfare number | n/a | house number |
| building or tower | premise | BUILDING | building |
| floor | premise | LEVEL | floor |
| unit, flat or office | premise | UNIT, APARTMENT | street 5, room number |
| post box or post bag | postal delivery point | POST_OFFICE_BOX | PO box |
| PIN code | post code | REGULAR | post code |
The tehsil, taluk or mandal is a real administrative level and it appears in rural addresses, but it has no output field of its own. It belongs with the locality it qualifies rather than in an administrative slot that nothing reads, and where a rural address carries both a village and a sub-district, the village is the locality and the sub-district is the level above it.
Because Indian city, district and locality names repeat across the country and are frequently ambiguous, the state and the PIN code are the two values that make an Indian address resolvable. An Indian address supplied without one of them should be treated as incomplete rather than as merely untidy.
CDQ delivers the state or union territory with its ISO 3166-2 code. An SAP system does not validate against ISO: it validates the region field against its own region key table, T005S, which is part of a customer's configuration. That key exists for tax and jurisdiction purposes, which is why it follows national tax or statistical numbering rather than ISO, and why the level it sits at differs from one country to the next.
The region key is customer-specific configuration, so this standard does not define one: a T005S is specific to a customer and to a client, and no single value would be correct everywhere. What this standard fixes is the ISO 3166-2 code. The mapping from it to the key your system expects is yours to maintain.
For India the key your configuration holds is conventionally a number, where the ISO code uses two letters, so the two share no characters and this one is a lookup rather than a transformation.
Treat the ISO code as the value CDQ guarantees and the SAP key as a mapping you own.
Unit 402, 4th Floor, Sunrise Tower, North Main Road, Koregaon Park, Pune, Maharashtra 411001, in the CDQ address model:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Country | IN |
Administrative area 1 (REGION) | Maharashtra |
| Administrative area 1 short name | MH |
Administrative area 2 (COUNTY) | Pune |
Locality 1 (CITY) | Pune |
Locality 2 (DISTRICT) | Koregaon Park |
Thoroughfare (STREET) | North Main Road |
| Thoroughfare number | empty for this address, since the building is named rather than numbered |
Premise (BUILDING) | Sunrise Tower |
Premise (LEVEL) | 4th Floor |
Premise (UNIT) | Unit 402 |
| Post code | 411001 |
The examples below show the shape of each dataset, not its full contents. The complete published lists for India are on the CDQ Wiki page business partner metadata for India, which also covers legal forms, identifier types and the integrated data sources.
38 entries, covering the 28 states, the 8 union territories, and two units that were superseded in 2020 and are kept so that historic addresses still resolve. Each carries its ISO 3166-2 code and names in English and Hindi, with German, French and Chinese where these exist.
| Code | English | Hindi |
|---|---|---|
IN-MH | Maharashtra | महाराष्ट्र |
IN-KA | Karnataka | कर्नाटक |
IN-TN | Tamil Nadu | तमिल नाडु |
IN-DL | Delhi | दिल्ली |
IN-TG | Telangana | तेलंगाना |
Three of the 38 are units created or changed in 2020: Ladakh, the reduced Jammu and Kashmir, and the merged Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. The two superseded units, Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli, remain published so that an address written before the merger still resolves.
A published list of city name changes, so that a historic name resolves to the current one. Twenty-two Indian cities are covered, among them Bangalore to Bengaluru, Poona to Pune, Banaras to Varanasi, Balasore to Baleshwar and Keonjhar to Kendujhar, each with the Hindi form alongside.
Six digits, no separator, no leading zero.
The state or union territory is standardised against reference data: whether it arrives as a name, a two letter code or an ISO code, the canonical name and the ISO code are written back, and a Hindi name resolves to the same record as its English one.
Post codes are validated against the six digit format.
The district, the city and the levels below them are preserved as submitted. Where an address provider is enabled, it can enrich and complete them.
India is the country in this set where the published reference data reaches least far below the top level. These are the gaps worth knowing about before designing an integration.
| Limitation | What it means for an integration |
|---|---|
| The Indian address vocabulary is not yet published | Marg, Path, Gali, Chowk, Cross, Main, Nagar, Colony, Layout, Sector, Phase and Block, and the premises words Flat, Wing, Tower and Plot, are not yet maintained as reference data. An Indian street value is therefore preserved exactly as submitted, without a recognised type and without a short name, and a flat or a wing is not parsed into a premise. Treat an Indian street value as free text. |
| Landmarks are not yet recognised | Near, Opposite, Behind and Beside introduce a landmark rather than a place, and are not yet recognised as such. A landmark arriving in the street field stays there and is compared as though it were part of the street name. Map it to an address supplement on your side. |
| The city rename list does not yet cover the best known renames | Twenty-two Indian cities are published with their name change. Bombay, Madras and Calcutta are not yet among them, which are the historic names most common in long lived master data, so those do not resolve to their current names. |
Because the Indian street vocabulary and the landmark words are not yet published, an Indian street value frequently arrives holding the street, the area, a landmark and sometimes the building, and it is delivered the same way. Treat an Indian street value as free text for now, and use the state and the PIN code as the keys you rely on.
An Indian address is written smallest first and uses as many levels as the place has: state, district, sub-district, settlement, area, street, building, unit. There is no national street naming or building numbering convention, landmarks are commonly part of the written address, and a large number of cities and several states have been renamed within the life of the master data that describes them.
CDQ places the state in administrative area level 1 and the district in level 2, the city in locality level 1 and the area, sector or colony in level 2. The street and the plot number stay in separate fields, and the building, floor and unit are typed premises.
All 38 states and union territories are maintained as CDQ reference data with their ISO codes and Hindi names, including two units kept so that pre-2020 addresses still resolve, together with a list of Indian city name changes. Below the state level the published coverage is thin: districts and places are preserved as submitted, and the Indian street, area and premises vocabulary is not yet maintained as reference data. The state and the PIN code are therefore the two values an Indian integration should rely on.
- Business partner metadata for India
- Thailand Address Standard
- Korea Address Standard
- United States Address Standard
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