About Know Your Netaji

Know Your Netaji is a civic transparency tool that maps the financial and corporate connections of Indian Members of Parliament. By combining publicly available data from election affidavits, electoral bond disclosures, and corporate registries, it lets citizens explore who funds their representatives, what assets they hold, and which criminal cases are pending against them.

Data Pipeline

• MP profiles, criminal records, and asset declarations are sourced from election affidavits via MyNeta.info (Association for Democratic Reforms).
• Electoral bond data comes from disclosures mandated by the Supreme Court of India, published by the Election Commission.
• Company and director information is sourced from MCA21 (Ministry of Corporate Affairs) public filings.
• All data is normalized, deduplicated, and stored in a local SQLite database for fast querying.

Entity Resolution

Connecting MPs to companies and bond purchasers requires matching names across datasets that use different spellings, abbreviations, and formats. We use a multi-pass approach: exact match on standardized names first, then fuzzy matching with Levenshtein distance and token-set similarity. Each connection carries a confidence score (high, medium, or low) so users can judge the strength of a link themselves.

Limitations

• Not all connections can be verified — some matches may be coincidental name overlaps despite our confidence scoring.
• Data freshness depends on source updates. Affidavit data reflects the most recent election filing; company data may lag by months.
• Electoral bond data covers only the disclosed period. Bonds purchased before mandatory disclosure are not included.
• This tool does not imply wrongdoing. Criminal cases listed are pending or under trial — not convictions.

Open Source

This is an open-source civic tech project. The code, data pipelines, and methodology are available for inspection and contribution.