Track Lok Sabha polls on Google

From anywhere in the world, you will be able to track Indian leaders and candidates in the 15th Lok Sabha elections — just like in the US presidential elections — through a new Google website. Expected to be launched soon by Google India, the site will be updated regularly with the help of National Election Watch, an umbrella group of 1,200 NGOs, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Feb 18, 2009, 01:26:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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From anywhere in the world, you will be able to track Indian leaders and candidates in the 15th Lok Sabha elections — just like in the US presidential elections — through a new Google website.

Expected to be launched soon by Google India, the site will be updated regularly with the help of National Election Watch, an umbrella group of 1,200 NGOs.

What’s more, through an auto-play mode on Google Maps, one can travel from

Delhi University to Oxford tracking PM Manmohan Singh’s journey.

Similarly, for LK Advani, the map will take you through Karachi, where he was born, to Delhi and Gandhinagar.

The interactive website will also have space for blogs and commentaries on the elections, campaigns and views from India and abroad.

“We have collected data from National Election Watch and are working on disseminating the information to citizens. We are also in talks with different political parties in this regard,” a Google India spokesperson told HT.

Sanjay Jain, a project developer with Google India, made a presentation on the company’s Lok Sabha poll coverage plans at a recent national conference of a Mumbai-based NGO, Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), which runs National Election Watch.

“We cannot talk about the project till it is formally announced,” Jain said.

But Anil Bhairwal, ADR’s national coordinator, said they had provided data on 50,000 candidates, who contested the 14th Lok Sabha polls in 2004 and in subsequent assembly polls. “It will be an interactive website where a netizen will be able to navigate any of the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies and track the records of the candidates.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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