Cong’s poll secret? A portal with ear to ground

NEWDELHI: Over the past few months, there’s a certain routine Congress president Rahul Gandhi follows when he arrives at a city, town, or village for a rally — he has spoken on several occasions since September 1. Gandhi calls a local, grassroots, booth-level party worker and asks him if he is attending.

Allowing Gandhi to do this is a software the Congress president has named Vidya, a nod to the data-enriched knowledge that can be pulled out from it.

The platform is powered from a stuffy room at the Congress headquarters on Akbar Road in New Delhi. There, the party’s data analytics department head, Praveen Chakravarty, presides over a team tracking each booth in election-bound Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Telangana.

That’s around 1.72 lakh booths; each booth is coloured one of three shades, indicating the density of dedicated Congress workers in that area. The workers themselves are listed in order of their political activity.

Over the past two months, the data team has geo-tagged millions of such Congress workers and their mobile phone numbers.

Gandhi, before reaching the rally venue, swipes through the software on his phone (the front-end of this database) to find the “toppers” and calls them directly.

“It’s unbelievable to many booth-level workers that Rahul Gandhi himself has called him or her. So, we often get complaints that ‘someone pretending to be the Congress president has called workers’,” laughs Chakravarty.

The use of such technology by the Congress’ rival Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wouldn’t surprise anyone.

Indeed, as Hindustan Times first reported in late September, the key to that party’s campaign for 2019 is the “cell phone pramukh”, and there will be one for each of the 927,533 polling booths in the country. This person is expected to drive the BJP’S extensive Whatsapp-based campaign for the election, and each such person will have a smartphone given by the party.

CONTINUED ON P 10