This attitude of politicians, of wanting to only speak out and not listen, has led political party websites to be static, non-interactive entities used for pushing information such as press releases.

Of the seven national political parties, five have official websites, the Bahujan Samaj Party and Prasad's Rashtriya Janata Dal being the exceptions.

"Our party site performs a function akin to corporate communication--it is a tool to disseminate the official party stance and policy," says Prodyut Bora, convener of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, information technology cell.

"Our focus is on getting the basics right. It may make great headlines to say we're experimenting with social networking and online donations, but we want to follow a structured and systematic approach." About 36% of India's Internet users, says Balendu Shrivastava, the business director of the eTech Group of IMRB International, are between the ages of 18 and 23.

Social networking As a result, online tools such as social networking, video and photo streams seem to have caught political parties' attention, but at the moment they appear to be comfortable dealing with these only at arm's length. "Something like social networking would imply informality, and therefore will not be on the main site," says Bora.

Congress party general secretary Rahul Gandhi's team has put up a site, www.pressbrief.in, to push information about the Gandhi family and about his visits to various parts of the country. The site includes audio, video and a Flickr photo stream, but has no interactive features, limiting it to "Please feel free to e-mail us at press.brief@gmail.com or info@pressbrief.in." Some smaller urban-centric parties, taking advantage of higher Internet penetration, are using the medium successfully. The Jago (wake up) party, which plans to contest legislative assembly elections in Delhi and Rajasthan, has a unique interactive feature that tracks "incidents" of corruption and crime. Users are invited to post complaints against authorities or private parties including companies. Deepak Mittal, president and founder of the Jago party, says, "People face different types of problems but never complain because the process of complaining is difficult. We want people to come forward and register their complaints." According to Alexa Internet Inc., the Internet information site which provides traffic rankings for websites, Jago ranked 25,420 among Indian sites, better than some national parties such as the Nationalist Congress Party (ranked 199,279) and the Communist Party of India (288,055).

Sharma of QuBitTechnologies says even larger parties may be able to take advantage of the Internet if they emulate parties abroad.

"The way the Web is being used abroad by politicians has something to teach us. Apart from the audience, which is young or has a technological bent of mind, the driving force is collection of money (for campaigns). Unlike India, they have to collect money within the limits set by law. The amount of money that can be collected from an individual is limited, so they have to reach out as far as possible. More than half a million people have contributed to (US presidential candidate Barack) Obama's campaign," he says.