Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Vote Chooser - Indian Version

Recently I came across this interesting site - VoteChooser.com This site is simple way to allow people to decide to vote between Obama and McCain based on their respective policies. Site poses simple 10 questions - and bang you know whom you should support at the end of the questionnaire. (By the way, I was supporting 7 Obama policies out of 10 total questions).

Since, Indian general elections are around the corner, I thought building similar website would be very useful. Despite many differences, most of the Indian politics revolves around UPA, NDA, and Left forming two and half major fronts. So the concept is simple - posing 10 questions, answers to which should lead you to vote for either NDA or UPA alliance.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find 10 differences at policy level between UPA (Congress) or NDA (BJP)! I checked Congress's website - a major party in UPA alliance and BJP's website again a major party in NDA alliance for possible publicly declared manifesto/ policy document. But there is nothing on those two websites.

So my quest for VoteChooser Indian version has hit the major road block in the absence of 10 major differences between two poles of Indian politics. Irony is that parties representing 1.2 billion people do not have policy agendas on things that matter such as infrastructure, education, health care, foreign affairs etc. This is surprising, may be I am missing something. Any suggestions? Can you lead me to form those 10 questions?