Niti Plans to Transform India with Digital Elections
Niti stands for new initiatives to transform India. Mumbai-based media and technology company Niti Digital has announced the launch of IndiaVotes.com, claimed to be India’s largest public elections resource.
It covers all Lok Sabha elections since 1952 and all state elections since 1977. Much of the raw data for the site has been sourced from the public domain and then processed to make it useful for analysis, says the company.
The idea behind making this data publicly accessible is to encourage data-driven decision making in the political domain.
[ Also Read: What Twitter Says for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney ]
Even though election data is available online, it is not easily searchable or cannot be consumed in structured formats necessary for analysis. IndiaVotes aims to become the open-source equivalent of election information in India.
“IndiaVotes is an outcome of our own desire for accessible data on Indian elections. It was conceived because the world’s largest democracy deserves a participative democratic platform for electoral information,” said Veer Chand Bothra, CEO of Niti Digital.
[ Also Read: Is it the Death of Democracy in India? ]
Niti is founded by serial technology entrepreneur Rajesh Jain. Niti Digital has teams working in the digital media space (NitiCentral.com), on elections (IndiaVotes.com) and in creating collaborative technology platforms for community organizing.
“The combination of digital media, big data and communications technology will help shape decision making in future Indian elections. Niti Digital wants to be at the intersection of these streams. By making Indian election data easily accessible to all, IndiaVotes is an important step in this direction,” said Rajesh Jain, MD of Niti Digital.
[ Also Read: 10 Simple Reasons I Love My Country India ]
The company says IndiaVotes already has over 200 national as well as state elections data sets that will be further enriched with inputs from users. Going ahead, voters will be able to add information on issues affecting their constituency, it says.
The announcement was made today, Nov. 29.
Photo courtesy: National Informatics Centre
