NRI techies clean up India's election mess from U.S.
Thursday, 25 March 2010, 15:45 IST
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NRI techies clean up India's election mess from U.S.
Bangalore: Showing their love for mother state, eight young professionals from Bangalore, who are based in U.S. are studying and debugging information from the electoral lists for the upcoming BBMP polls and returning sanitised, organised, analysed data to party volunteers so that they can campaign more effectively. These young techies filter the information that BBMP puts out in its voters' lists for the elections and sends error-free data back to Bangalore. The information on voters' lists is taken from the site,www.bbmpelections.info. Data is taken from PDFs, turned into HTML files and further organised into spreadsheets where it can be easily sorted and searched. Talking to Renuka Phadnis of Bangalore Mirror, Keshav, a group member and software professional based in the U.S. said, "We are not checking the data against any other set. We are only organising it and spotting errors such as duplicate names/lists and mistakes in the age of people (such as '150-year- old' voter!)." The group has also developed a software which finds the error very minutely. The software they have developed uses proprietary software as a base. "We wrote scripts and macros on top of popular Microsoft spreadsheet software," said Keshav. Talking about other mistakes found in the list Keshav said, "We find all kinds of errors in the list. It is never-ending. There are hundreds and hundreds of errors in each booth. Across wards, almost 40 per cent of the names of voters are wrong. For instance, L G Ramalingam is listed as El Ji Ramalin and G Santosh is Jee Suntoshe. To locate this person's name in the list when he goes to vote will be a hellish task. If there is a J Santosh, he (Jee Suntoshe) would probably vote for him." The eight Bangaloreans include Rajaraman, Murali, Nishant, Umashankar, Sandeep, Sudeep, Suresh Setty and Keshav. These all people are engineers, management and product development professionals, artists and multimedia specialists. They work entirely on a voluntary basis. "Our focus is on bringing about change in India. We are sick and tired of corrupt politicians," said Keshav.

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