The Indian General elections are underway and are by far the world’s largest exercise of democracy. India has nearly 900 million eligible voters (out of the 1.3 billion population) who will exercise their right to vote in this Lok Sabha Elections.

Let’s learn more about the Indian Election in numbers:

1 million: Number of polling stations set up

800: Number of candidates running for the Indian parliament

3.9 million: Number of EVMs in use

For Indians, voting is not just a fundamental right but the biggest choice they need to make to ensure the right person represents them for the next 5 years.

The Challenge

Do you know the biggest problem we as voters face?

The problem is that most of us are unaware of our choices. While the national narrative is largely split into two major political parties, the choices that trickle down are not so straightforward.

Our Solution: Election Helpline Service

On April 16th, we launched a “Know your Candidates” (KYC) helpline. Using this helpline service, citizens can avail the list of ALL the candidates contesting from a constituency.

All you need to do is call 08047107777 and enter your pin code to receive the election candidates list over an SMS. Basically, we crowdsourced the data and presented it in an easy to consume manner.

But before we talk about the success story of this election helpline service, let’s look at how we came up with the idea and the challenges we faced in building it.

The starting point for the election helpline idea came from this -

What can we do to explore the power of a simple phone call to educate voters during this election.

Our goal was to build a solution that would scale and work even on a simple feature phone without the need for anything more sophisticated. We found that the simplest way possible was by using a person’s pin code. As simple as it sounds, there were a lot of hurdles in implementing this.

There were two major challenges here -

1. Getting the list of candidates for a given constituency

2. Mapping a pin code to the right constituency

Implementation

After a little time on Google, we found that different people were solving bits and pieces of the puzzle. The Election Commission maintained a list of affidavits submitted by each contestant at a unique URL for each constituency here- https://affidavit.eci.gov.in/

This was a great point for us to start.

But we still needed to map a pin code to the right constituency. We tried to find someone who had maintained this information somewhere for easy retrieval. Dead end. The closest we went was in finding this interesting API endpoint from India Post data http://postalpincode.in/api/pincode/<pincode> endpoint. Though it was promising, it did not give back data at the constituency level. It was at the Taluk level and mapping it to the constituency was error prone.

And then we encountered this tweet from Arun Ganesh:

The Mapbox team had implemented an API to get the constituency & the link to the affidavits given a location using latitude and longitude. We played around with it & it was incredible. This helped us solved half the puzzle. The only thing left was to convert the pin code to lat-long location. After researching, we found a few crowdsourced data that returned lat-long given a pin code. But our initial excitement, however, was short-lived as the output lacked accuracy.

At last, we turned to Google Maps for this information. Using the Google Maps’ GeoCoding API, we were able to find the pin code of a lat-long location.

After all the information in place, we put it all together using a simple Gather & Passthru flow that we created using our Exotel flow builder. Passing this to the MapBox APIs got us the constituency details. We sent this to the user via SMS using our Send SMS API.

You can find the code here.

Results

In April alone, we received 1480+ calls. That’s almost 100 calls per day (the campaign went live on 16th April).

We received an overwhelming response on Twitter and Linkedin as well. You can also read about the helpline activity covered by the folks at PCQuest.

Your Turn

As more than 100 constituencies go to vote in the next 2 phases, we urge voters to make an informed choice. Call 08047107777 now!

Happy Voting!

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