The dust has settled down after the 2014 Indian elections. Psephologists continue to wonder at the success of the mass outreach programs pursued by the political parties during the elections. The biggest exercise of democracy has witnessed the NaMo wave sweeping the country’s electorate and the world is left bemused at the remarkable rise of a common man to become the beacon of a nation’s hope and aspirations. Quite interestingly, technology has played a dramatic, yet unprecedented role in revolutionising political campaigns and changing the spectrum of information dissemination. Unsurprisingly, many start-ups have led this extra-ordinary turn around and now is a good time to analyse the impact of a few significant ones.
Voxta – The political ‘Siri’
On the forefront of these is Voxta, a start-up specialized in speech recognition. BJP’s association with this start-up in the build-up to the voting day is touted to be this election’s masterstroke. The start-up launched an interactive phone-line for the BJP, powered with speech-recognition. The voters dialled-in, said the name of any issue and heard Mr.Narendra Modi talking to them about his party’s policies on that specific issue. In a country where the internet penetration is as low as 12%, this idea of connecting to the masses through mobile phones (India’s mobile penetration is 75%) through a voice based innovative approach turned out to be a game changer.
Dubbed famously as India’s “Political Siri” (named after Apple’s famous voice recognition software), Voxta catered to the common man’s need to know more about the policies and views of the candidate and enabled him to make an informed decision when he exercised his franchise. Most importantly, this is just a presage of the things to come. The start-up’s founders Sirish Reddi and Kavita Reddi envision Voxta to “deliver information and access to the unconnected billion or so people and give them opportunities to drive economic growth.” Besides successfully delivering this massive voice-based campaign, they also offer several scaled solutions like a phone-based spoken English test, data mining of voice calls, a virtual customer service agent, and many customized customer engagement applications. Rest assured, the journey ahead for Voxta is full of unexplored and exciting opportunities.
Social Media Analytics
Another realm where the Indian elections provided an ideal space to experiment and innovate is the social media analytics platform especially because of the 100 million users in the Indian social media set-up and their potential influence over their families and friends. Frolle, a Bangalore based start-up turned the approach in collecting voter trends by providing firms information from twitter conversations. Frolle started as a provider of real-time updates to travellers based on twitter and then operated as a local social newspaper. The tipping point was when it decided to use the underlying technology to provide valuable insights and election trends through analysing over 10 million tweets every day during the elections. Frolle partnered various media houses and political parties powering their social media hubs during the elections
It also played a prominent role in leveraging twitter in engaging citizens to voice their views and make them counted. It successfully formulated India’s first twitter debate associating with the “Headlines Today” media house. It created a precedent in bridging the gap between the thought leaders and the country’s politicians. The start-up’s founders see Frolle go beyond twitter and have begun working on to offer “Behaviour as a service” especially for retail and e-commerce companies and those who want to target very specific interests of their customers. A similar company Simplify360 analysed more than 35 crore social media conversations on the elections and partnered with The Economic Times for The Social Media Buzz Analysis Report that ranked the top 10 politicians and political parties.
Another prominent player was Modak, a Hyderabad based analytics start-up, which took on the arduous task of building India’s first Big Data-based electoral data repository of 81.4 crore voters by extracting info from 2.5 crore PDF pages and translating them into English to fuse with other sources. It also applied analytics over the data collated and provided actionable insights to the various political parties.
Increasing voter awareness
A number of technology based start-ups acting as not-for-profit entities also played their part in educating the voters about the candidates in their respective constituencies.Dailyscoop.in, a start-up founded by Ramana, a retired SBI manager in Bhopal, compiled all data available about the candidates, analysed them and compared them on parameters such as educational qualification, cases accused, percentage increase in assets, prominent political roles, most prominent work, etc and came up with quickly comprehensible fact-sheets.
iForIndia.org functioned as a web-based citizen engagement platform enabling citizens to express their views on the incumbent elected representatives by rating the services provided by the government in the respective constituencies. Its founder Ankur Garg, a former Microsoft employee, aspires to put technology and internet into use to create awareness and address the gap cause due to the absence of benchmarks / parameters to evaluate an elected member during his tenure.
Karnataka Learning Partnership (KLP), on the other hand, played a unique role in disseminating information to candidates across party lines on the education demographics of the areas they are contesting. It created reports on primary education of 28 Parliamentary constituencies in Karnataka and shared it with nearly 140 candidates contesting over them. Another start-up, theballot.in, served as a visual compendium of data about the country, providing the citizens with facts, digestible and relevant nuggets of information as richly illustrated graphs and charts. It catered to those who wanted to use the elections as an opportunity to know more about the country besides their candidates.
These start-ups have used the 2014 elections as a great platform and have done a remarkable job in creating awareness on the candidates, engaging and mobilizing the voters in being part of the largest exercise of democracy on the planet. But the bigger picture remains a challenge and it will be a fascinating experience to see how these companies can tweak their models, identify the right customers and provide value to them in becoming a sustainable business venture.
Article by: Saravanakumar, PGP 2013-15
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