Well we have blogged about the various online initiatives leveraging the upcoming elections but here comes the big one by Google. Google has partnered the likes of Association for Democratic Reforms, HT Media Limited, Indicus Analytics, the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, the Liberty Institute, and PRS Legislative Services to launch what would be a called an information website for the upcoming elections. Google calls it the Google India Elections Centre.
Google India Elections Centre is available in both English and Hindi and aims at providing the following services to prospective voters:
The website will allow users to..
- Confirm their voter registration status
- Discover their polling location
- View their constituency on a map
- Consume relevant election-related news, blogs, videos, and quotations
- Evaluate the status of development in their constituency across a range of indicators
- Learn about the background of their Member of Parliament and this year’s candidates
Yahoo too recently launched its election portal and this move by google has come just at the the right time to counter Yahoo. Election is probably the largest public event that comes once in every 5 years and this time around as the internet userbase is fairly large (compared to 5 years ago) most sites believe that the elections might be opportunity to get more users come online and engage on the web.
You may also want to check out IndiaNumbers – http://www.indianumbers.com/elections which is started by few folks in Silicon Valley.
There are several such sites coming up these days but what is required is a collaborative effort from the public. I like the nocriminals.org campaign but still a lot of these are distributed.
Wow! Google now in elcetion portal too. Unbelievable.