Internet giant Google launched a newt ool as part of its elections portal offering called 'Know Your Candidates'. This tool will allow citizens to get easy access to relevant information about political candidates contesting from theirconstituency and their incumbent Member of Parliament. It integrates publicly available information sourced from Indian organizations such as the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), PRS Legislative Research and Liberty Institute India.
The Know Your Candidate tool will provide information for each sitting Lok Sabha MP and contesting candidates including disclosed educational background, financialdetails and social media presence (wherever available) along with video bios of the candidates provided by Ping networks. It is mappedonto Google Maps interface enabling citizens to find the informationby using pin codes of their area or by zooming on their locality onthe map.
The Google Elections Hub is an online destination where one can access elections-related news and information created to help 800 million Indian voters stay informedand updated about the elections. The site also includes features suchas elections related News Videos, Search Trends, G+ Hangout Series,and an interactive Pledge to Vote campaign.
Google created its first electionstools seven years ago when our engineers noticed a huge increase insearch traffic around the election period in the United States. Todayover 20 countries including Malaysia, Thailand, and now, India haveelections pages that aid voters during election periods. Google aimsto encourage people to be more participative and engage withcandidates. It also allows voters to have a deeper understanding ofpolitics and governance through engagement with the candidates.
Commenting on the launch, RajanAnandan, VP and Managing Director of Google India, said "In thelast five months, we have made a concerted effort to provide ourusers a one stop destination for all their information needs for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. With the launch of this tool, we haveadded all the important information of the contesting candidates withthe help of groups such as ADR and PRS Legislative Research who havebeen doing a stellar job of collating all the important informationabout the candidates. We hope that making this information easilyaccessible will help Indian voters learn more about candidatesrunning for public office and help them to make an informeddecision."
Prof. Trilochan Sastry, a founding member of ADR applauded this launch saying, "We are delighted tocollaborate with Google to launch this tool, which will help ourconcerted effort to disseminate to the citizens of India thebackground information of the candidates contesting the Lok Sabha2014 elections that will enable them to make an informed choiceduring voting. As citizens we have to play a proactive role inensuring that we choose politicians who are clean, honest andcommitted to the progress, security and development of the people ofIndia, and we at ADR have been working on deeper reforms includingpolitical party reforms and in the last few years have obtainedseveral landmark judgments from the Supreme Court and Central Information Commission."