How BBC Visual Journalism covered Indian elections?

Shadab Nazmi

5 min readMay 29, 2019

Products

Pre-election

Price calculator:

Hindi: https://www.bbc.com/hindi/india-47025982

Marathi: https://www.bbc.com/marathi/india-47025983

Telugu: https://www.bbc.com/telugu/india-47067404

Punjabi: https://www.bbc.com/punjabi/india-47075897

Tamil: https://www.bbc.com/tamil/india-47038940

An interactive that uses the Consumer price index to calculate the price of a certain set of goods over the years. The main object of the project was to illustrate the price change of common goods between governments.

Data:

Presently there are two bodies that calculate the CPI in India. Data from both are not compatible with each other. Deciding which source to use for the project took time. After multiple checks and analysis, we settled on The Labour Bureau series because it gave us a broader time range for comparison.

Deciding what to show the audience went on into the production phase. Initially, we planned to only show price data based on the user’s input but in the end, we also added weight/amount data after the team agreed that it would be a value add.

Design:

Building on the Carbon Footprint Calculator we added a slider for the user’s input.

Since the project was based on a template, the translated words would fill in the blanks. This made it unrealistic to have simple one-word translations. The developers personally sat down with the translators from various languages to make sure the sentences that were formed from the template and the translated words made sense in the languages.

Party Manifestos:

As the parties put out their manifestos, we collated the promises from them into predefined categories like Jobs, Farmers, Income Support, Economy and Taxes, Education and Women etc. We used a pre-existing template and modified it to fit our needs.

Hindi: https://www.bbc.com/hindi/india-47783203

English: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47899882

Modi’s Report Card

Hindi: https://www.bbc.com/hindi/resources/idt-ffb901e8-5bc7-498c-8bd5-94b4fa95929a

Telugu: https://www.bbc.com/telugu/resources/idt-41a7a769-e575-4eb2-a191-01dfa3a5bbfe

Gujarati: https://www.bbc.com/gujarati/resources/idt-1446a24f-c729-4b99-bc75-d96632e1ef90

Punjabi: https://www.bbc.com/punjabi/resources/idt-2d843cf3-148f-4e43-9ff2-df33902c4251

Marathi: https://www.bbc.com/marathi/resources/idt-edb20dba-6507-4a33-b743-ef558a78ee70

A comprehensive analysis of all the promises made by the BJP in their 2014 manifesto. Our data team went through each promise manually to set its status. The process involved going through Parliament questions, official reports, and surveys to determine the progress. Each promise comes with an explanation of its status and links to sources of the information.

With around 30,00 words to translate, this was a massive project. Data analysis took almost a month and continued into the production phase of the project. This also pushed the translations as the content was getting added in phases.

The editors were thoroughly involved in the process and multiple checkpoints were created to go over the content.

We also added an extra document for the audience to explain why we only included 336 promises out of the 400 from the manifesto.

The scrollytelling introduction was a ‘Nice to have’ but it was still implemented parallelly with main functionality.