National Election Watch

National Election Watch (NEW) is a civil‑society‑driven transparency campaign that systematically gathers, verifies, and publishes the criminal, financial and educational backgrounds of every candidate contesting elections in India. Launched in 1999 by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), the initiative gained constitutional relevance after the Supreme Court’s 2002 judgment in Union of India v. Association for Democratic Reforms, which ordered the Election Commission to make candidate affidavits mandatory. By turning statutory disclosures into a publicly searchable database, NEW has become the primary source for voters, journalists and scholars seeking evidence‑based assessments of political aspirants. ## Origins / Historical Background The Association for Democratic Reforms was founded in 1995 by former IAS officer Dr. Narendra Kumar, whose vision was to inject data‑driven accountability into Indian politics. In response to growing concerns over undisclosed criminality, ADR inaugurated National Election Watch in 1999, initially focusing on the 1999 Lok Sabha election and publishing paper‑based dossiers in Delhi’s public libraries. The watershed moment arrived on 12 May 2002, when the Supreme Court, citing the Representation of the People Act 1951 (Section 80), directed the Election Commission to compel candidates to file affidavits detailing assets, liabilities and pending cases. Following the court order, the Election Commission issued its first set of guidelines on 30 January 2003, mandating that all candidates submit a sworn affidavit in a prescribed format. ADR seized the opportunity to digitise the affidavits, creating the “My Neta” portal on 15 July 2004, which later became the public face of NEW. Early data‑entry teams, comprising volunteers from the National Law School of Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology, manually transcribed over 1,200 affidavits for the 2004 Lok Sabha election, establishing a reproducible workflow that persists today. ## How It Works / Mechanism Each candidate is required to file an affidavit under Section 80 of the Representation of the People Act 1951, declaring assets, liabilities, criminal cases and educational qualifications. NEW’s field officers retrieve these documents from the Election Commission’s filing centres, cross‑check them against publicly available court records, and upload the verified entries to the My Neta website within 48 hours of receipt. The platform assigns a unique identifier to every candidate, enabling users to compare historical disclosures across multiple election cycles. In addition to affidavit data, NEW employs Right‑to‑Information (RTI) petitions to obtain supplementary information such as party‑wise expenditure reports and election‑commission audit findings. A crowdsourced verification layer, launched on 1 March 2015, invites registered users to flag inconsistencies; each flag triggers a secondary audit by a team of three senior researchers, ensuring a false‑positive rate below 2 percent as reported in the 2021 ADR audit. The final dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution‑NonCommercial‑ShareAlike 4.0 licence, allowing unrestricted reuse by media outlets, academic institutions and civil‑rights NGOs. ## India’s Journey From the 1999 Lok Sabha poll to the 2024 general election, NEW has catalogued information on more than two million candidates across 543 parliamentary constituencies and 403 state assemblies. The 2019 election report revealed that 43 percent of all candidates had at least one pending criminal case, while 10 percent faced charges of serious offences such as murder, kidnapping or corruption—a figure that fell to 38 percent in the 2024 cycle, reflecting a modest but measurable decline. The campaign’s persistent exposure of “criminalisation of politics” prompted the Election Commission to tighten its 2013 guidelines, introducing a “criminal background index” that ranks candidates on the severity of pending charges. ADR’s advocacy, bolstered by NEW’s data, also influenced legislative reforms: the 2013 Representation of the People (Amendment) Act incorporated a provision that bars individuals convicted of offences punishable with imprisonment of two years or more from contesting elections for six years after release. Moreover, the 2020 “Model Code of Conduct” amendment required parties to publish a summary of candidate affidavits on their official websites, a practice first observed in the 2021 West Bengal assembly election. ## Current Status / Implementation As of March 2024, the My Neta portal hosts 1.8 million individual records, with an average daily traffic of 120,000 unique visitors and a peak of 850,000 accesses during the final week of the Lok Sabha campaign. The Election Commission’s “Voter Helpline” now embeds a direct link to NEW’s candidate search