How MCA data actually works (and what the open dataset misses)
The MCA21 portal, data.gov.in dumps, the V3 API, and the gap between them. A practical guide.
The Ministry of Corporate Affairs runs the MCA21 portal at mca.gov.in. Every Indian company has a CIN (Corporate Identification Number), every Limited Liability Partnership has an LLPIN. Every filing (annual return, balance sheet, change of director, creation of charge, name change) is recorded against the company's file.
There are three ways to get this data. The MCA21 web portal (one company at a time, captcha-gated). The data.gov.in MCA Company Master Data catalog (bulk dumps, refreshed monthly, missing many recent fields). The MCA V3 API (rate-limited, requires registration).
Each has gaps. The portal is rate-limited and not designed for bulk. The data.gov.in dump misses charges, financials, recent director changes, and is at least 30 days stale. The V3 API requires authenticated access and does not expose financial filings in machine-readable form.
Kestrel uses all three. The bulk dump is the backfill. The V3 API is the daily incremental. The portal is the fallback for fields the API does not expose (annual filings in PDF, which we OCR for financial metrics).
A common mistake is to scrape the portal as the primary source. It rate-limits aggressively, the captcha defeats casual scrapers, and it produces a slow, brittle ingest. The right architecture treats data.gov.in as the truth-set for prior state and the V3 API as the truth-set for changes.
The other common mistake is treating MCA data as the only source. MCA tells you what the company filed. GSTN tells you whether it is operationally active for tax. Udyam tells you whether it is MSME-registered. DGFT tells you whether it exports. Each source covers a different question and the company graph needs all four.
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