This Portal Helps You Track Your Neta's Assets, Educational Qualifications & Criminal Cases An interactive open source portal makes knowing your constituency's leaders easy
By Rustam Singh
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Information is power – and with enough information at hand that is easily accessible, individuals can make better informed decisions. While this applies to virtually every topic under the sun, choosing the leaders of tomorrow is fundamentally more important. The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that citizens have a right to know details about their MP's and who they decide to vote in power, well in advance before election time.
Thus, this information is submitted voluntarily by all leaders in power and available publically. However, while it was earlier just trapped under lots of paperwork somewhere or a non-encouraging official website, Netafilter Map has opened doors to making the view more user-friendly.
Using the data already available freely at MyNeta.com's database, the website now has a representative map based image of the same. Users can hover over any region they would like to know more about and instantly get data about MPs from that region.
Interface
The interface looks like the darker, sleeker version of Google Maps. The political territory of India is marked very clearly and has "spots" in shades of green and saffron to denote what fields users can browse through. The deliberately low resolution map has been stripped of unnecessary details to help load faster on insanely slow internet connections in the country.
What all can users view?
With a simple hover over the constituency, you can view the MPs:
- Education qualification
- Net declared Assets
- Criminal cases
While legally speaking, this information must be updated and correct, it's important to note that it's very well possible some netas could easily lie on the same – at least about their net assets worth. We are of course, not counting the scores of black money that anyone may possibly have. But this is a good way to know, how much these politicians have in their kitty; officially.
What's missing?
What would have been great would be to attach photographs of the Netas about whom the information is presented on the map. Photographs can be opened from the free press as well as several open source platforms, however, it's always a good idea to view someone's face while you read about their criminal cases.
The map can also be designed to work better on slower internet connections, but given the large size of the images, it's going to be difficult.
Who can benefit from this service?
- Ideally, every informed citizen of the country should have at least a glance at the same to know what kind of leaders are in power in the location you live in.
- This would also be very useful during election times, to make better decisions.
- To settle internet arguments, it would take just one glance to see how a particular constituency is scoring. It's also a great way to backtrack someone's history if you read about him/her in a news article.
- The best part about the portal is its completely open source and users are encouraged to modify the code and create replicas, or copy and freely use the information presented in any manner they see fit.
How's your constituency fairing, do you have honest, well educated leaders in power or do you see individuals with over 10 criminal cases against them? Let us know in the comments on our official Facebook page Entrepreneur India
