This is derived from the candidate's affidavit to the Election Commission. We have built a scoring system based on the number of years imprisonment the candidate would get if the charges against him are upheld by a court. A candidate with no charges is classified as 'Excellent". At the other end of the scale is 'Controversial', with two other classifications: 'Good' and 'Passable' in between these. Please remember the charges against a candidate are just that: charges; he is not guilty unless the charges are upheld in court.

This shows the percentage votes polled by each party in that constituency in the 2009 Lok Sabha election on one axis and the most recent Assembly election. This should give you a good idea on how the constituency has voted in the two most recent elections. For the Assembly axis, Assembly Election results are rolled up to the Lok Sabha constituency level. The axes are scaled to log base 10.

The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), India collects periodic surveys related to umemployment, consumer expenditure etc. This often is the primary source of various indicators which are used for planning and policy formation by various Government Organizations as well as researchers. We have used the relatively recent 66th(2009-2010) and 68th(2011-2012) round of unemployment data collected by the NSSO. The 66th survey comprises of all the states and almost all the districts (612 districst in the 66th round & 626 in the 68th round). Each district in a state is stratified using certain criteria based on their population, and a set of households are identified by sampling from these strata and a list of questions are posed to each member of the identified households. (We used the data on the "usual principal activity" of persons in each household to calculate the number of unemployed person over each stratum and then aggregated it over all the strata of each district to get the unemployment rate at the district level). We have used this data as the base and have estimated the unemployment rate as defined by NSSO. Detailed formulas for estimation can be referred in the NSSO website.