Lok Dhaba

Lok Dhaba is a freely available, structured, and curated data archive on Indian electoral outcomes for General and Assembly elections from 1962 onwards. It is a great source of study for psephologists, political scientists, economists, sociologists, journalists, and students and researchers.

Lok Dhaba has been built meticulously by taking data from the website of the Election Commission of India (ECI) and multiple other authentic sources. To build this archive, we have navigated various challenges of data collection and curation, consistency checking and disambiguation, and integration between multiple sources with its provenance.

Lok Dhaba data are hosted on the workspaces of Ashoka’s Datalake. These can be accessed as raw data, browsed as relevant images, and can be used to create personalized visualizations and tables. It leverages the power of advanced tools of the Datalake.

Indian Election System

India follows a parliamentary democratic system based on the principles of universal adult suffrage, which means every citizen aged 18 or above has the right to vote. The Indian election system is primarily divided into two types:

1. General Elections: These are held every five years to elect members of the Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament). India is divided into 543 constituencies, each electing one Member of Parliament (MP) using the first-past-the-post system, where the candidate with the most votes in a constituency wins.
2. State Elections: Similar to the general elections, each state elects members to its Legislative Assembly. The state's Chief Minister is chosen from the majority party or coalition in the Assembly.

Additionally, there are elections for the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of Parliament), where members are elected by state legislatures, and for the President of India, who is elected by an electoral college consisting of MPs and MLAs.

At the state and parliamentary levels, the elections are conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the state election commissions in 28 states and 8 union territories. ECI publishes the data on every electoral outcome.