MileageBachao is an independently owned, provenance-tracked directory of petrol pumps in India that sell genuine ethanol-free (E0), 100-octane fuel — and of how fresh each of those facts is. We take our legal posture seriously because our one real asset is the trustworthiness of that database. This page summarises how we operate and links to the full documents.
Who operates MileageBachao
MileageBachao is operated by an Indian company that owns and stores all of its data in India, in DigitalOcean’s BLR1 (Bengaluru) region. Indian-entity ownership and India-resident data are deliberate choices: they keep full data rights with the company and keep us comfortably inside India’s geospatial, data-protection and intermediary regimes. The company’s registered name, office and identifiers are finalised at incorporation and published here before public launch.
Facts, not compilations — the provenance ledger
Everything MileageBachao publishes about a pump is a fact — outlet name, RO code, address, coordinates, and which grade it stocks. Under Indian copyright law (settled in Eastern Book Co. v. D.B. Modak) facts and public records are not protected by copyright, and India has no separate database right. We take only facts, re-keyed into our own schema, and never mirror a source’s layout, HTML or wording.
To make that defensible and auditable, every displayed fact must trace to at least one row in an append-only, immutable data-provenance ledger. Each ledger row records the fact’s source, licence, retrieval date and acquisition method, and the licence “store” it belongs to. This is a hard engineering requirement, not just documentation — if a fact cannot be traced to a ledger row, it does not ship. The requirement and how the database enforces it are documented for engineers in docs/DATA-PROVENANCE.md.
Three separated data stores
We keep three logically separated stores and never merge them row-for-row — the separation is a licence firewall:
- Our proprietary register — the facts about who sells E0 / 100-octane fuel, with per-grade provenance.
- An OpenStreetMap layer under the ODbL — map geometry and brand density only, kept separate so its share-alike terms never reach our register.
- Government statistics under GODL-India — national denominators and coverage figures for our stats pages.
Full credits are on the Attribution page.
Our compliance posture, in brief
- Data protection (DPDP Act, 2023): DPDP-by-design — minimal collection, on-device location, itemised notice, affirmative and easily-withdrawn consent, and a self-serve rights path. See the Privacy Policy.
- Intermediary (IT Rules, 2021): once user contributions are live we operate under Section 79 safe harbour with a published Grievance Officer and defined SLAs. See the Terms of Use.
- Geospatial: an Indian entity needs no licence to store and publish coarse pump coordinates; we file a self-certification of adherence, and our accuracy is well inside the regulated threshold.
- Sourcing ethics: we take facts, not compilations; we never circumvent access controls or reverse-engineer private app APIs; and we use statutory RTI requests as a primary, unimpeachable refresh channel.
- By design we never build: free-text reviews or star ratings, single-source prices, or displays of dealer / proprietor names — each removes needless liability while keeping the data trustworthy.
Contact & grievance redressal
We acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and resolve them within 15 days(72 hours for specified content categories under the IT Rules). Reach us at:
What we keep an eye on
Indian law here is evolving, and we review these items quarterly rather than assume they stay put:
- the still-unnotified geospatial “negative list” of restricted map attributes;
- the phased commencement of the substantive DPDP obligations (expected in 2027) and the exact penalty-power dates; and
- our headroom below the “significant social media intermediary” threshold (5 million registered Indian users), which triggers heavier duties we do not currently owe.
Read next: Privacy Policy · Terms of use · Attribution.