KOCHI: Come every election, be it to the Lok Sabha or the legislative assembly, the one thing citizens hear most is promises. Every people’s representative, be it the MP or the MLA, comes out of the woodwork into which they had disappeared after winning the previous election, making new or repeating promises!
And the poor voters, who can’t keep track of all the things mentioned in manifestos, get taken for a ride, again. However, technology might just come to the citizen’s aid this time around, and perhaps push the decision-makers into decisive action.
A youngster from Tiruvalla has developed a tracker called Keralam Promise Tracker to track the promises made by the UDF during the 2026 assembly elections.
Jeremiah P Prince, a 19-year-old who cleared Class 12 and will be joining a data science course, told TNIE that he has seen that political parties are not held accountable for unkept promises.
“They make promises without compunction and take people for a ride. Growing up, I’ve watched political parties make promises during election season and face almost no structured accountability once in power. The UDF manifesto, in particular, contained promises that felt disconnected from the fiscal reality they themselves acknowledged,” Jeremiah said.
The youngster felt it had become acceptable for nearly 1,300 commitments to just fade into the background after the elections. “This tracker exists to make those promises impossible to quietly forget, especially for younger voters who often have a limited idea about the politics in our society,” he said.
Explaining the tracker further, he said, “The Keralam Promise Tracker is built around the UDF manifesto for the 2026 assembly elections (sourced from gpura.org).
The manifesto contained 39 key promises and four key policy commitments, which break down into approximately 1,300 individual subsections. I scraped all of them without omitting any, and built a webpage where each one can be tracked under four statuses – Fulfilled, In Progress, Evaded, or Pending.”
He cited three reasons for the decision to make the tool open source.
“The scale makes solo tracking unreliable. I wanted to eliminate any individual bias from the classification, and I believe public accountability tools should be publicly verifiable. To change the status of a promise, news from reliable agencies or official announcements is required and is quoted in the subsections of these promises,” he pointed out.
Jeremiah, who works as a content writer and data analyst, said that he is looking forward to launching the LDF promise-tracker too.
“However, building an accurate system requires an immense amount of work and time, as I have to go back to archives of reliable media and RTIs to verify the promises. Because I prioritise data integrity over speed, this verification process will take some time. So does the tracker,” he said.
Jeremiah will be using media reports, official announcements from chief minister/ministers/respective government offices for his tracker website. “Since we get to know a huge chunk of these official announcements from media firsthand, I am relying on reliable Tier 1 media groups,” he added.