Teen Builds AI Tool That Helped 70,000 Voters in India

Kapil Bhaskar had a problem. He was 16, too young to vote in Tamil Nadu's election, but old enough to see something broken.

Voters faced over 4,000 candidates across 234 constituencies, each with thick legal affidavits full of jargon. The Election Commission published the records, but reading them meant wading through hundreds of pages per seat. With 17 candidates on average per ballot, nobody had time for that.

So the Chennai high schooler built a website in six days. He called it Nee Yosi, Tamil for "You think." The tool did one thing beautifully: it took official candidate records and stripped away the legal language, presenting criminal cases, assets, and education in plain Tamil and English.

The entire build cost him $18. He scraped data from the Association for Democratic Reforms using AI tools, coded for 48 straight hours, and launched it on his phone.

Within 24 hours, 15,000 people found it. By election day on April 23, over 70,000 voters had used Nee Yosi to research their candidates. The website spread through WhatsApp groups and social media without any advertising or marketing push.

Naren Viswa, a college student in Chennai, explored candidates beyond his own district just because the site made it so easy. Sudha, a longtime Adyar resident, used it to help her house cleaner who doesn't read English. "The simplified manner in which the website lists all the necessary information in Tamil was very useful to her," Sudha says.

The Ripple Effect

Tamil Nadu recorded an unprecedented 85% voter turnout that day, with 5.67 crore people casting ballots. While no single tool can claim credit for that historic number, somewhere in those millions were 70,000 people who paused to look something up first.

Kapil didn't set out to change democracy. He loves math and coding, and like most teenagers, he enjoys debating politics with friends. But he spotted a gap between what voters wanted to know and what they could actually access.

"Political transparency is a key tool for any democracy," he says. "Numerous people told me that they used my website to decide who they were going to vote for."

The feedback humbled him. Here was a bedroom project built in less than a week, and it was helping first-time voters, seasoned citizens, and people who had never researched a candidate before make informed choices.

Kapil won't be old enough to cast his own ballot for two more years. But he's already planning the next version of Nee Yosi, one that tracks whether elected officials actually delivered on their campaign promises. From who asked for your vote to whether they earned it.

"I know that I want to put my skills in statistics and computer science to use in a way that helps society," he says. After watching 70,000 strangers use something he built in his bedroom, he knows he's on the right path.