Empowering India: Making democracy meaningful
Country:
India
Producer:
Liberty Institute
Empowering India provides citizens with easy access to information about political parties, candidates and electoral constituencies at national and provincial levels. The basic premise is that information promotes transparency in the democratic process, thus allowing citizens to assess their political leaders’ performance and thus hold them to accountability. A more responsive political process encourages citizens to actively participate in the largest democratic exercise in the world. The primary focus of Empowering India is the voter, who can realistically contribute to making democracy meaningful not just in form, but in substance. The website currently has detailed election results since 1977 and has also captured background information filed by thousands of candidates who contested elections at national and provincial levels since 2003. The information is provided at the respective constituency level in an easy to compare manner and is also available for various analytical purposes.
Jury Evaluation:
Empowering India is a website design with multi-functional social media platforms such as facebook linked to it. The design capability to track democratic voting and voting districts in populous India sets an example for other democratic nations by providing helpful information regarding past and future elections in India. Among the e-government and Institutions entries, Empowering India sets the stakes as the only website focusing on the broader issue of information distribution of electoral data.
The complications which arise as a result of citizens not knowing the candidates whom they should vote for in their districts or localities is eliminated by the fact that Indian citizens can access online updates about political parties. They can do so in blogsites and news updates, which are also mobinet enabled.
The values which this website supports are common constitutional rights in modern democracies: The right to vote and to have access to information in order to exercise this right. Empower India thereby fosters the aim of making democracy more meaningful and encourages citizen participation. The availability of update news as well as online interactivity sharpens transparency and integrity in of the democratic political system. For Indian citizens, this website is easy to use, for research purposes it allows easy transmission of archived content through a built-in email capability. It also allows citizens to post comments.
With the recent and ongoing revolutions supported by online communication technologies and social media platforms in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and else, Empowering India is a pro-democracy online initiative, independent of state institutions, and supporting e-content access discourse. In facilitating political accountability through e-content creativity, this initiative could be even more relevant to other developing nations of the globe now than ever before.
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