Long story short, electoral victories can be a game of small margins. This possibly explains why political parties operating in a smartphone-savvy democracy are going all out to woo individual voters in various ways, including setting up war-rooms for social media campaigns, SMS or WhatsApp alerts, or targeted video/audio messaging. On the other hand, helping voters get past the propaganda blitzkrieg are technology platforms that teach them how to navigate the electoral system and make informed, data-driven choices.
As the general election nears, these websites or mobile applications are conducting detailed background checks on political candidates, or helping voters—predominantly urban—understand the enrolment process and timelines. Some are getting citizens to interact with their politicians directly, while others are parsing and simplifying public data to provide information about socio-political trends.
By and for the people“Technology is making citizenship cool by simplifying civic data that is relevant to people. This will ultimately make people’s participation in governance more meaningful,” says Sapna Karim, head, civic participation at Janaagraha, the Bengaluru-based non-profit that runs I Change My City (ICMyC). With a registered user base of 10 million people, the website and mobile app connects people facing common civic issues with their local political representatives or agencies.
By the end of January, ICMyC, which is also the technology back-end for the Swachh Bharat app, will launch a digital campaign that will help citizens get registered on the voter list. It will also address concerns regarding addition, deletion or modification of enrolment data. “We will get people to download forms, get additional documents together and direct them to the state-level site where they can register their names,” explains Karim.
Other civic technology platforms operating in this space, like the Delhi-headquartered Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), are leveraging the increasing social media usage among Indians. According to market research firm Statista, there will be an estimated 258.27 million social network users in India by 2019, up from close to 168 million in 2016. This number is expected to reach 370.77 million in 2022. Capitalising on this reach, ADR, which runs the MyNeta website, is putting out survey-based election trends, easy-to-understand infographics and videos on political candidates with their financial, educational and criminal backgrounds.
According to Retired Major General Anil Verma, national coordinator of ADR, the site has data pertaining to over three lakh political candidates who have contested in state and general elections. People can also dial a toll-free number to get specific information about their constituency and candidates. “We have roughly 7,000 hits every day. When we release election reports, the hits go up to 12,000. People accessing this data are not only voters, but researchers, academicians and politicians themselves,” Verma says.
ADR’s election survey reports highlight important trends in voter behaviour, like the gradual shift towards picking candidates over political parties and the decreasing role of caste in electoral decision-making. For example, in the Karnataka assembly elections, 86 percent people voted for the candidate, while those voting for a political party, religion and caste stood at 67 percent, 37 percent and 36 percent, respectively.
While ICMyC and ADR are non-profits functioning on donations and grants, individuals like Pratham Mittal are channelising this data to build companies that provide metrics based on which people can judge candidates. This way, they also generate data to predict and quantify voter behaviour. Mittal’s Neta app (available on Android and iOS platforms) helps people rate their local candidates on parameters like law and order, governance, economic reforms and corruption. People can also leave video messages for politicians.
“Citizen ratings can actually be early indicators of a leader or party’s performance in the polls,” he says. Giving an example of the neck and neck battle in Madhya Pradesh, Mittal explains how citizen rankings polled on Neta proved to be 98 percent accurate when they indicated that the Congress will win 112 seats and the BJP will have 106 seats (final results had Congress win 114 seats and BJP bag 109 seats). Similarly, the app clocked a 96 percent accuracy rate in Rajasthan.
“The infrastructure barrier, which existed two-three years ago, is now gone with better internet penetration. The next-level challenge is voter education, which often leads to user experience issues on the platform. The focus is to address this first,” says Mittal. As an engineering and political science student at the University of Pennsylvania, he had launched Outgrow, a platform that enables polling on websites. He does not plan to similarly monetise Neta right away, but is seeking strategic investments in media companies, which, he believes, is a “neutral way of getting into the data business.”
Getting the act together Experts say that while technology-enabled participatory democracy is a good idea on paper, on-ground implementation is not without its practical troubles. Arun PS, a Kerala-based lawyer who has done extensive research on pre-legislative public consultation, believes that people have traditionally been kept out of the policy-making process, which is why today they do not know the extent to which they can engage with or influence lawmakers.
According to him, technology platforms can become powerful intermediaries. “They can bridge the gap between people and politicians, and ensure that citizens have a say in law-making,” he says. “Then again, these organisations have their own limitations and cannot be very impactful if the government itself does not welcome or streamline the process.”
Ruben Mascarenhas agrees with Arun. His team at the Litmus Test Project (a collective of change-makers) had successfully launched the Operation Black Dot (OBD) campaign in 2017 to encourage young voters in the municipal elections in Mumbai. With the support of the Maharashtra Election Commission, they had a Facebook bot targeting first-time voters, Twitter campaigns that reached over one crore people, and collaborations with filmmakers and stand-up comedy groups to help the message grab more eyeballs.
The result was that Mumbai registered a 55.53 percent voter turnout, the highest since 1992. “To scale up or replicate such projects, we would need institutional backing, like the Jaago Re voter awareness campaign that was bankrolled by Tata Global Beverages Limited. Alternatively, there must be full support from the Election Commission of India (ECI), which is not easy to obtain,” says Mascarenhas, who is also the national joint secretary of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
“The advantage of working in a demography like India is the diversity. In the developed parts of the world, such platforms cater to a largely homogenous population, which will not work here,” she says. “We have to find solutions that will engage people in multiple languages and mediums, which gives platforms like ours a wider scope for being replicated worldwide.” Since the launch in September 2018, Civis has a registered user base of 150 people.
While internet seems to be the future, experts point out that the electoral process in India continues to be driven by human connect. Political analyst Preethi Nagaraj finds technology platforms limited in scope. “Thinking that an app or a website will get legislators closer to voters is lazy politics. A large section of rural voters are not comfortable with mechanised communication. They might not trust any of these platforms immediately, unless it is linked to rewards,” she says. “In India, technology is alien for many citizens and might remain so during their lifetime. So while we push for digital interventions, we must make sure that we do not alienate a whole generation of people.”
Sunil Abraham, executive director, The Centre for Internet and Society, believes that while such platforms could increase official accountability, they could also be manipulated by vested interests because they are under-resourced. “This is a systemic problem in many parts of the world,” he says. According to him, such platforms must be careful to insist on KYC in order to avoid fake online activity and trends. “And in order to simultaneously crack both the sustainability and the manipulation challenge, these platforms must migrate to free and open-source projects so that the digital infrastructure built by some stakeholders can be taken forward by others when the fatigue sets in.”
First Published: Jan 22, 2019, 15:29
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