Send using TCP Socket not working

I am using Python SDK, I created an Index and TCP Socket connection using below

## Create the index if it doesn't exist
if 'kpiindex' not in service.indexes:
    if verbose > 0: print "Creating index 'kpiindex' .."
    service.indexes.create("kpiindex")

# Create the TCP input if it doesn't exist
input_host = kwargs.get("inputhost", DEFAULT_SPLUNK_HOST)
input_port = kwargs.get("inputport", DEFAULT_SPLUNK_PORT)
input_name = str(input_port)
if input_name not in service.inputs:
    if verbose > 0: print "Creating input '%s'" % input_name
    service.inputs.create(
        input_port, "tcp", index="kpiindex", sourcetype="kpiindex")

global ingest
ingest = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
ingest.connect((input_host, input_port))

(At this point I have confirmed that "kpiindex" is available in the list of indexes on splunk dashboard.)

Going forward the data to be indexed from a CSV file is read into a buffer and then sent to splunk using below.

ingest.send(buffer)

However this data is not visible in splunk. Please help!