India: MapmyIndia has launched a public service Website to help voters in India to make an informed choice during the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. Combining its India maps with data on constituencies, like population, literacy ratio, area amongst others and information on parties, candidates and their track record, the Website places good amount of information and analysis for voters to refer to. For example, with the click of a button voters can view constituencies where candidates with cases pending against them are contesting elections on a digital map – red markers showing up against these on the map versus green markers for the others.
With the analysis page, visitors can slice and dice data as they like and bring up statistics like oldest and youngest MPs in the 2004 parliament, number of women candidates elected in the previous polls, public record of candidates, number of constituencies per city, social details about constituencies like working population, area and literate population amongst others. MapmyIndia has joined hands with NoCriminals.org in providing this information on candidates.
MapmyIndia has had earlier links with the election process as well. The highly popular Jaago Re campaign is powered by maps from MapmyIndia for displaying constituencies. For 5 major cities in India, MapmyIndia has also plotted polling booths in constituencies for Jaago Re, so that voters know where they can go to cast their vote.
The site also has constituency boundaries marked on the digital maps. Due to the constituency delimitation exercise since the last polls, voters now have a quick reference to see which polling booth they can go to cast their vote.
