Monday, February 11, 2002		The world of  dot.com

IT'S election time and the general mood can at best be summed up as 'eclectic.' Of diverse opinion and divergent views. Day after tomorrow Punjab goes to polls and psephologists would have tough time predicting the outcome. As our lead article suggests that the voting mechanism of the future could well be Web-based, this week riding on the poll wave we are providing a list of Websites related to election.

www.webdunia.com/election

A site, webduniya.com, covers all general topics like calendar, religion, food recipes, literature, tourism, health, sports, business and elections. Devanagri fonts have been used for the site. Besides Hindi, this site is also available in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. National and International news is available on the index page. There is a special link for the NRIs, which is based on NRI services and news. On the elections page there is a list of states and Union Territories. General news about elections is available here. This site covers all four states where elections are going to be held. One can view the election news of a particular state by clicking at the state name on the top of the page or by selecting the state in the combo box available on the right side. Party manifestoes, party's views on various issues, controversial issues, constituencies, constituency wise list of the candidates. There is a link where we can see the previous results of the elections. In short this site has an answer to all election-related queries.

www.upelection.com

Formally launched by Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj, this site deals with all aspects of elections. The sub-sections include Political issues in UP, General news, Political parties, Live election coverage, Policies of previous govt., Election commission, Expert opinion, Previous assemblies, CMs and Governors, Query, Picture gallery, Polls in other state etc. The ticker on the upper half of the page shows the list of the latest news of elections; one can click it for the detailed news. Site also provides UP election survey and online poll. 'Polls in other states' is the section where we can see the news of elections movement in Punjab and Uttaranchal. There is a fair coverage of news from other states also.

www.punjabelections.com 

As the name suggests this site provides election information about Punjab only. Along with the news stories there are many other sections, which give us good amount of information regarding Punjab elections. Photo gallery of the site is a section where we can see maps and photographs. Results of previous elections, from 1967, are available here. The site provides information about partywise percentage of votes polled and seats won, final number of candidates partywise and constituencies won by different parties in previous elections. Overall this site provides good details about present Punjab assembly elections and previous results.

www.rediff.com/news/elec.htm 

On this page we can find links for previous results and on the top of the list there is a link for information of upcoming elections. The link, www.rediff.com/election/index.htm, is the page where we can find the news of the states and constituencies achieved well according to the date. Schedule for the elections to the legislative assemblies, state-wise news with the maps showing the constituencies and other information related to elections is available here. Like other sites it does not only focuses on a particular state it has information about all the four states where elections are scheduled.

www.tribuneindia.com 

Index page covers the main news stories related to the elections of the four states. From index page one can go to the Punjab page, which provides the news of the elections in the region. The stories are arranged under different headings, like Top stories, politics, community etc. On the right side, links are provided which take us to the earlier stories of previous days. There are links provided for the information related to the candidates of the constituencies and a map explaining the constituencies with their numbers.

– Amit Puri