Google has launched the Google India Elections Center to help engage India’s 700 million eligible voters in the country’s 15th general election, set to take place over the course of the next month. Google launched similar web based election centers in the U.S. and Australia in the past, but Google India’s election center has some new features which make it worth a look.
Available in English and Hindi, Google’s Indian election center lets Indian citizens confirm their voter registration status (which is a new feature that wasn’t fully implemented in the U.S. or Australian versions), find their polling location, view their constituency on a map and access election news. Voters can also get in-depth data about the area where they vote, including changes in literacy, poverty, and employment rates in the constituency since the last election. Voters can learn about the background of their Member of Parliament and this year’s candidates, and are able to see politician’s voting records, and attendance. The site will also feature updates on election schedules, online polls, discussion forums, opinions and photos.
Google has partnered with the Hindustan Times, and a number of NGOs, including, the Association for Democratic Reforms, Indicus Analytics, the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, the Liberty Institute, and PRS Legislative Services. Yahoo developed a similar site for Indian citizens last week, but Yahoo’s site doesn’t seem to be as comprehensive as Google India’s election site.
I’m wondering if Google will continue to dive deeper into the political data realm, doing things like the Sunlight Foundation is doing (http://www.sunl...labs.com/about/) with sites like http://opencongress.org.
Seems to jive well with Google’s mission statement. What do you think?
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Didnt expect Google to do this kind of service specially for Indians. Shows some really good stats comparing the past elections!
Jaago Re! (http://www.jaagore.com) a not-for-profit organization is doing a good job educating voters to go and vote and have a very good following online. We are supporting this by adding the profiles of the past and present politicians. You can know your politician @ http://www.jobs...our-politician/
Here you can find complete profiles of the politicians. Know your politician.
This is a nice move by Google, but still there is a lot of scope for improvement. Unlike US, India does have not a lot of information organized in the way Google can use. for example, if you search for a city, Google Map points to the wrong place. I tried Udaipur, Rajasthan and the result was 400 miles north of proper place. So, if They cant find a constituency properly, definitely there would be other missing parts too. Specially when a lot of data in buried under red tape.
I couldn’t help but read that in an Indian Accent
Almighty Google is doing good in India,
That’s good to hear. With the number of customers/users/employees that Google has in India, it’s about time they did something in return for India, I’d say.
Hope you guys got a chance to see this. It’s more informative i guess.
http://in.elect....com/index.html .
It’s about information and it’s useful – so it’s part of Google’s “mission”. It will definitely help democracy in India and it will help outside India to understand better how diverse and developing this huge region of the world really is.
Google doesn’t owe anyone any thing so the fact that they implemented this in the most logistically complex election on the planet should only be received like every other product launch, that it has a business intent.
That said, I am amazed it is released. I cannot comment on its accuracy but this IS a giant leap, especially for a large number of educated individuals who do not even know the boundary of their constituency but can identify at least 30 of the US states. I am one of these people.
All in all, a good thing if it helps perk up interest in voting in the apathetic young middle class.
Leena, as far as voters being able to confirm their registration status people made possible by Google I will like to highlight that they can already do it at various Election Commission websites since so many years (atleast 5 years).
All Google did was index all the electoral roll PDF’s. E.g:
http://ceodelhi...15/A0150102.pdf
Infact all these electoral rolls used to be part of the Google’s main search index. If you searched for a person’s name the electoral roll PDF would show up on Google search. They suddenly vanished from the Google’s main index about a year back.
People from Delhi can use:
http://ceodelhi...c.in/search.htm
ECI also offers a central place to search on its website across India:
http://eci.nic.in/
Great effort from Google! There are few other websites also – http://www.indianumbers.com, http://in.elections.yahoo.com/, http://nocriminals.org etc.
This is the first time Indian elections are going digitial!
It would be nice to see this on many more countries!
Google is trying big time to break into the mass. Language support, internet bus, and now this… and doing a good job of it.
I see nothing great about this site .. this is just another site for elections and just another news feed.
Data about various Constituency you can get this information from various feeds. Other topics in this site is just news feeds from HT and google news and blogs for election 2009.
If you see the quotes its also repeated in a single instance of the page. [waste] since they avoided scroll bar in the div its also coming incomplete. Rest is mentioned in Jayant’s post. Constituency search is nothing but google maps that too not accurate and also doesn’t seem to work every time.
All in all its just a waste.
If u r really interested in India election 2009 please visit http://eci.nic.in/
Also Please Leena stop making everything that google does “a news”.
elections will be the watershed moment for internet in india. all political parties have an online presence. National Parties have spent in millions in SEM. All online media properties have an election site. NGOs have their own sites that help voters take informed decisions. Internet is helping add vibrancy to the Indian democracy.
elections will be the watershed moment for internet in India in terms of generating user awareness towards the medium.
All political parties have an online presence. National Parties have spent in millions in SEM. All online media properties have an election site. NGOs have their own sites that help voters take informed decisions.
Its a win win right now. Internet adding vibrancy to the worlds largest democracy and the worlds largest democratic exercise helping increase mass awareness of the internet medium.
i recently wrote an article about this
anjali sen
new and innovative..something that should generate some enthusiasm in the youth regarding issues that really matters to us.
All said and done, with this much of rich data, I doubt if they done a good job. It took me just one weekend to come up with my election mashup. Take a look at the information I arranged using gmap.
I was expecting bigger and better content display and navigation from G. May be I am demanding :-/
Now all indians can track latest election news through Google.
http://indiagen...ctionsHome.aspx
Thanks to the new voter awareness in India, every brand wants to join the election bandwagon.. Google has done nothing.. But sensed an opportunity to build up its brand and jumped into the whole lot of other brands who are trying to be on the good side of the Indian Consumers.. [The country that will have the highest Google revenues in the next 10 years as per their internal calculations]
Indeed a great job..But, people in India, who can read, write AND have access to internet, are not those who are most uninformed..In-fact, these people have a history of low turnout in elections…Those who live on less than a $ a day need most help…But I still thank Google for its initiative
Hi am currently out of the country but I am an Indian citizen having a voters Id. I would like to know if I could still cast my vote online and if yes whats the proceedure.
Thanks
Ami
Can I vote online,since I am a student studying outside the country.Please share the website and procedure.thanks
Jas
awesome news for india, hope that google can develop the service and connect with europe.