Millions of people are gearing up in India to participate in the world’s largest democratic election in the world. A clear trend in this year’s election campaign is the spurt in online grassroot political movement, esp from  urban areas. The goal of these grassroot movements is to educate and make voters aware of their political choices. Nocriminals.org is one such organization that is focused on preventing political candidates with a criminal record run for the elections.Here is a short Q&A with R.Gurumurthy, a coordinator with Nocriminals.orgKB:How did the No Criminals campaign start? What has been the response?

RG: Most of us are concerned about the governance and happenings in the country and in our thoughts and private meetings debate about the need and a common urge to bring in change.

The Mumbai terror attack (26/11/2009)and what we in the aftermath of the public coming together proved to be a turning point.  It showed and proved that public movement can do wonders.Encouraged by this, a  group of young professionals conceived and that resulted in the birth ofNocriminals.org. The response to the initiative has been very encouraging.

KB: What are the primary goals that the No Criminal campaign hopes to achieve? And, what kind of success has the campaign achieved so far?

RG: The primary goal of the initiative is to decriminalize politics. We reached out to various political parties and encouraged them not to give tickets to political candidates with criminal backgrounds. We  also reached out to the Indian electorate through our campaign and urged them not  to vote for a candidate with criminal back ground. In a short span to time we been able to create a good degree of awareness about our campaign through press coverage in main stream media along with our multimedia and social networking efforts. We have a Facebook page that has over 5,000 members and have short video clips on YouTube. Also, we have partnered with other organizations like Jaagore and Association of Democratic Reforms among others  to spread the word.

KB: What methods to you use to verify and validate which candidate or political party member has a criminal record?

RG: Our information and data is based on affidavits submitted by the incumbent Members of Parliament (MP) during the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. Moving forward we plan to aggregate similar data for the contestants of 2009 Lok Sabha elections.

KB:Do you think your efforts to collect and build a database would have been possible if there was no Rights to Information act?

RG: It would be relatively tougher to collect data without the Right to Information act.

KB: Could you describe what kinds of outreach efforts you have put in place to help people access the information you have collected? Is the information available in other languages besides English?

RG: All our information is available online. We also have a mobile dimension to our outreach effort. We developed a sms support system and you can retrieve information using your mobile phone and verify if a MP has a criminal record. You can do this by sending a SMS with your zipcode. Try this SMS NC <your pincode> e.g. “NC 110001″ to the number 567678 and you will get an sms showing the criminal charges of your sitting MP.

We are working on getting the 2009 data  before the elections.Right now the information is available in English, but we have had various regional language media cover our outreach efforts.

KB: How have the political parties and politicians reacted to the No Criminal campaign?

RG: More than the parties / politicians, it is the voters, those who choose their leaders, have to wake up and act. We see that change is happening.

KB: What happens to the campaign once the elections are over?

RG: We will  continue with our work and focus on  electoral reforms for assembly elections. 

KB: Anything else you would like to add?

RG: This is not a one shot game at clean politics, but something that we need to keep working on a continuous basis. Join the movement for better governance and together we can bring change.