New facility to know your candidates

Information regarding the candidates in the upcoming elections will now be available at your fingertips.

Think tank Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and Facebook have joined hands and will provide information about candidates in the upcoming polls through phones using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) technology.

The USSD is a protocol used by cellular telephones to communicate with the service provider's computer systems.

The users will have to dial *325# from their mobile to access Facebook and select the election menu (option 6) or directly dial *325*35# to access the election menu.

The facility is free of charge, said a statement.

"This initiative with Facebook will allow us to expand our reach. Voters will be able to know the worthiness of the candidates - their educational, criminal and financial information at their fingertips and choose wisely. Simply voting in an uninformed manner is not enough, citizens need to make an informed choice," said ADR founder and trustee Trilochan Sastry.

Ankhi Das, Facebook director of public policy said: "We hope to make information more readily available to users about the antecedents and performance of political candidates. Our goal is to enable citizens to get involved in issues of governance".

According to Facebook, over 82 million Indians access the social networking site regularly.