Tazeen is a data journalist and visualization engineer.
“I come from an educational background in Engineering where I chose to work at the intersection of technology and social cause. I worked on road accidents and groundwater shortages during my undergraduate study.”
2022 MJ Bear Fellowship Project
Know Your Politician or Do you know your candidate is a collaborative effort by the BBC Visual and Data Journalism teams to enable the readers and voters to make the best choice of their candidate for state assembly elections.
Uttar Pradesh is the most populous Indian state with a population more than 200 million. As data scientist Aron Strandberg shows, every country in Africa, Europe, and South America has fewer people than Uttar Pradesh. The state has 403 assembly seats for which thousands of candidates from different political parties and independent candidates file their nominations to contest elections.
As millions of people choose their politicians or members of the legislative assembly, it becomes difficult to access and analyze the profile of individual candidates for thousands of such candidates. The profile of the candidate includes their Educational Qualification, Criminal Record, Wealth and other such details.
This project is an attempt to simplify the process for a voter to look at the profile of each candidate in the constituency they vote in and compare these candidates across the criteria of education, criminal records, wealth and representation of women. To simplify it further, there is a dropdown, where one can select their constituency and details of all candidates comes up. There are filters of education, criminal record, wealth and women candidates in a descending order for comparison. At the end is an SVG of the assembly constituency heatmap for each filer which shows performance of each constituency in terms of percentage of candidates having criminal records, or percentage of candidates 12th pass or above, etc. This gives a relative idea of which constituency is doing better in terms of candidates contesting the election.