Association for Democratic Reforms & Webrosoft

Website:- www.adrindia.org, www.webrosoft.com
Project: - Election Watch Software

The Need
There is a very strong need to provide the Indian electorate with definitive information pertaining to antecedents of candidates contesting elections. It is required that this information be authentic and easily accessible to various stakeholders (voters, journalists, NGOs, etc.). It is also vital for the data to be processed into ready information at a fast rate so as to have maximum impact and enable the Indian voter to make an informed choice.

The Innovation

A web based application called EWS (Election Watch Software) was created to streamline data entry and data analysis of data pertaining to background (educational, criminal & financial) information of candidates. EWS has built in checks to maximize authenticity of data. The application also generates extensive reports pertaining to background details of candidates. These reports are easy to reproduce by the media. Constituency level and candidate level analysis is also made available on the web portal http://myneta.info. EWS also generates data which can be used in the SMS campaign. The SMS campaign provides a user with information of candidates in his constituency on the user’s mobile phone.

The Impact

The voters now have extensive data pertaining to the background of candidates and parliamentarians from their constituencies available through various sources (website, mobile phone, toll free helpline). This data includes crime, assets, liability and education related data. Also comparative data like comparison of ‘winners vs losers’, ‘comparison of increase of assets of a parliamentarian’ etc. are available to give better perspective.

The media get relevant information for numerous stories which helps in formation of the big picture (eg. Percentage of Criminal Candidates fielded by different Political Parties in a state).

Civil Society organizations are able to run more effective campaigns related to informing voters and pressurizing political parties to clean up politics.
Political Parties also get structured and insightful information which is used by honest party workers to build pressure for change.