Chennai: Clueless about your candidates? Chennai's active anti-corruption NGO, Arappor Iyakkam has launched a free App that gives the voter all the information on various candidates in the fray in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. The 'Arappor Iyakkam' App can be downloaded for free on Google Playstore, says the NGO's convener Jayaram Venkatesan.
He said the App is available in Tamil and English and its information is taken from the declaration filed by the candidates in their affidavits filed with the Election Commission while presenting their nomination papers.
The details include the income of the candidate and spouse over the last five years, their assets and liabilities, educational qualifications and profession pursued, besides details of any criminal case pending.
"These details are critically important for a voter to decide on the deserving candidate. For example, there are candidates who have no source of income in the last five years, yet they have managed to accumulate a large number of assets. In some cases, the assets have multiplied about 20 times", said Jayaram, whose App recently showed that the assets of DMK's north Chennai candidate Kalanidhi Veerasamy's wife had risen from 28 lakh in 2015-16 to 7.75 crore in 2016-17.
Pointing out that the media covers only important candidates and even there, not the entire information from their affidavits is picked up by journalists, Jayaram said his App gave all the information in the language understood by the voter by carefully translating from every candidate's affidavit. The candidates affidavits uploaded on Election Commission site are not uniformly in Tamil and some of them are in English too.Jayaram said about 200 persons worked on the App from March 26 to bring out the final product that is error-free as the data is checked at two levels by competent persons who are all working professionals who gave time outside their office time. Also, they worked on the App software simultaneously to bring out this hugely important information facility for the TN voter.
