People's Power

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Stanley Theodore
HYDERABAD, April 12: For the first time Indian elections is coming of age in cyberspace and is indicating how it would evolve to reflect the world’s largest election and do justice to a nation of a billion people.
Google added a brand new section to its India Website ~ www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/. Here one can key in a constituency, say “Medinipur, West Bengal”. The search throws back development data of this constituency along with a map generated from Google Earth. Below there is a box listing all the 42 Lok Sabha MPs from the state. Each member’s name, party symbol and details like assets and liabilities.
Further there is compelling information on the candidate’s Parliamentary performance like attendance, questions asked and debates participated. Extra information in the ‘Election News’ segment has news Websites, blogs and videos. The site would have been better if it added the 2009 candidates, yet the innovation cannot be discounted.
On 7 April Popular social networking site, Orkut, run by Google began a new section ~ www.orkut.co.in/loksabha2009. It has launched The Voice of the Youth. It is presently running polls on the most non-corrupt politician, most good looking politician, among others. Another poll is, “would you consider politics as a career option”, for which polling closes on 14 April. Rival site www.facebook.com has over 230 groups dealing with these elections.
The same day the reputed BBC commissioned the India Election Train. From 25 April to 13 May, BBC reporters will travel through India by rail, finding out what voters want and the key themes surrounding them. The train will visit Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Patna, among others. For this they have started www.bbc.com/india where visitors can track the train’s journey through an interactive map apart from accessing a daily blog.
Another Internet giant, Yahoo!, which has a huge number of users in India has begun a separate site ~ http://in.elections.yahoo.com/index.html. This is an absolutely comprehensive site having sections ranging from news and including tabs like schedule and ‘Election Basics’. This has a segment called ‘Election Myths’, one of them being that voter ID card is essential for voting.
This apart other sites have come up some informative and some cynical. There is a petition at www.petitiononline.com. The petition is from the Indian government to the Switzerland government asking them to return the $1,500 billion stored by Indians in banks there.
Things like these reflect a passion among people against corruption but then the Centre has said that this figure, being quoted by Opposition parties, is from unauthenticated Websites.

Who says that if we try to change the system, we will not succeed?
We are seeing the changes taking place because of public outcry, right in front of us.
The Mumbai Blast was the starting point when politicians started becoming apologetic.
Five criminal politicians have had their aspirations for contesting the elections aborted by our courts.
The Congress has been forced to withdraw Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar because of public outcry.
The SP has been forced to tone down its mad ideas regarding English and computers.
The above site is going to be a God-send.
If the public gets to know the criminal records of candidates from the web, the public outcry will make them withdraw the candidates.
Then honest people may be able to stand for elections.
WELL DONE PUBLIC.

Radheshyam