Indian Elections 2014 – Big Data for Billion People!

Indiaspora a forum for Indian American leaders published  an article by Ramachandran (Ram) J., CEO Gramener about how Gramener took up the task of analyzing large volumes of data into meaningful information for the general public to consume easily. 

An excerpt:

What comes to our minds as Indian diaspora when we think about Indian Elections? Humungous rallies, colorful campaigning, myriad party symbols and boisterous victory laps.
The Indian General Elections also have another perspective which often does not figure in our most buoyant thoughts.

– 300 parties, 8000 candidates, 800 Million voters, 1 Million booths served/secured by ~20 Million officials. The heady mix is further embellished with variety of structured & unstructured information – candidate histories, crime records, declared assets and audacious election manifestos. Mixed with the above is the frenetic activity on the day of results. Live streaming of results: ~21000 votes to be counted per second, from all corner of the country spanning an area of ~1 million square miles.

Thus, elections in India is a classic BIG DATA problem and the 2014 general elections was the biggest of them all.While technology may be able to process this humongous data, how can all this information be consumed and understood by a billion people? That too, in real time as it happens?

With plans in place and trial runs completed, the visualization dashboard went live on the morning of 16th May – the counting day. – will Gramener technology stand the ultimate performance test on this D-Day?

Answer came in the first hour – the visualization dashboard had over a million hits in an hour. Grew to a total of 10 million hits in a span of 12 hours! Social media exploded with humongous response to these live visualizations! Common people started consuming and sharing deeper insights real time! The various mass media channels lapped up the insights and reported them across the county. A new era in Indian election reporting was born! (http://ibn.gramener.com/live).

Read full article at http://indiaspora.org/blog/indian-elections-2014-big-data-for-billion-people/