Nerve Endings Firing Away

Satyen Bordoloi emailed me and other members of the DesiPundit team couple of days back pointing us toward a venture that greatly impressed me:

In a first for Mumbai, a portal www.MumbaiVotes.com, with the city’s most comprehensive resource for reliable, meticulously researched, and objective information to track promises and performance of the city’s MP’s, MLA’s and Corporators as well as candidates standing for elections this year, has gone live. MumbaiVotes is currently tracking 915 politicians and has over 3681 newspaper articles, video interviews, election manifestos and legislative records that can be accessed with a simple search.

As Satyen points out, the primary objectives of Mumbai Votes is to make information about their candidates readily accessible and hold our elected officials accountable. The advent of the Internet has made archiving, accessing, and dissemination of information quite easy and as the American elections showed us, this information can be pivotal in vetting our choices to lead us in these interesting times. I love it that it is a non-partisan effort and does not suggest any slant in favor or against any party.

The information is gleaned from “various sources like election manifestos, newspaper articles, video interviews and data sourced from reliable sites like PRSIndia.org, ADRIndia.org, eci.gov.in, loksabha.nic.in among others” and made visually appealing for a quick glance at a candidate’s record and promises [detailed methodology (PDF)]. You may be disappointed that this resource covers only Mumbai but it is just a start. Considering the overarching aims of this project and time spent (5 years) in collecting data for just these constituencies, it may take a while to document all 543 constituencies. I’ll be more than satisfied if we manage to document even half of that by next elections. Perhaps crowdsourcing information collection followed by validation can help speed up the process; something that the Indian diaspora like myself can also contribute to. I understand that this is just a start and we are quite a distance away from an Indian version of DailyKos provided Internet access and penetration is more ubiquitous. Only then can the Indian electorate flex its muscles and show that we don’t need any high promises but merely knowledge of opinions and policy solutions of our potential political overlords.

As the tagline at Mumbai Votes says, This Time Don’t Just Vote…Select. I couldn’t have said it better. Fulfill your democratic responsibilities by casting your informed vote in your constituency. After all, we get the leaders we deserve.