Niti Digital launches IndiaVotes.com as a public elections resource
Mumbai based media and technology company Niti Digital has announced the launch of IndiaVotes.com as an online 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.
The idea behind making of the IndiaVotes.com data publicly accessible is to encourage data driven decision making in the political domain. 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” VeerChand Bothra, CEO of Niti Digital, said,
Niti is an acronym for New Initiatives to Transform India and has been 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 organising. The company has also roped in veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta as the Editorial Director.
Besides Niti Central and IndiaVotes.com, the company also runs Chanakya Daily as a one-stop site for news that matters and Vote Niti as a free, special and secure website created for Gujarat candidates to provide information on from the field also to help in smarter decision-making for voter targeting and turnout.
According to the company, the idea behind making this data publicly accessible is to encourage data-driven decision making in the political domain. “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,” the firm said in a statement.
Niti Digital also facilitate its users to enrich the available data with their valuable inputs. Aam aadmi (common man) of the country too will be able to add information on issues affecting their constituencies. 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.
Veerchand Bothra, CEO, Niti Digital, said “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.”
Rajesh Jain, MD of Niti Digital, said “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.”
Rajesh Jain, who also runs Netcore Solutions, has been famous for launching IndiaWorld, the largest collection of India-centric websites in 1995 (Samachar.com, Khel.com, Khoj.com etc.), which he sold to Satyam Infoway, in November 1999, in one of the country’s biggest internet acquisitions ever.
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