Twitter Treadmill
Prime minister Narendra Modi lets his ministers know that they will be judged by their ‘social’ standing
A new micro-blogging initiative moves the Narendra Modi government machinery into top gear. Ministers vie with each other to stay on top of the game
As a prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi was quick to realise the power of social media. His two-yearold government runs a fairly successful outreach using it to communicate its achievements. Modi is also now the third most followed world leader, after US President Barack Obama and Pope Francis with 21.3 million followers on micro-blogging site Twitter and 35 million on his Facebook page.
In March this year, the Modi government ramped up its social media outreach, running workshops for ministers on how to use the micro-blogging site Twitter more effectively. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) also quietly monitors the performance of the cabinet on social media, grading the quality of their tweets. These ratings are also believed to have played a role in the recent ministerial reshuffle, and may well go down as the world’s first such e-governance initiative.
SOCIAL MEDIA OUTREACH
Until March this year, the government’s social media campaign operated in silos. Individual ministers pushed their ministries. Some like foreign minister Sushma Swaraj (also among the top 10 followed world leaders on Twitter) ran an outstanding public diplomacy campaign, reaching out to Indians in distress overseas. Other vital ministries, like civil aviation, food processing and women and child welfare, were either unrepresented or dormant.
The first indication of change came in March. The PMO hashtagged ‘Transforming India’ as the catch-all phrase to project the government’s second anniversary achievements. Ministers were instructed to use the hashtag every time they tweeted about major outcomes on social media. This would allow the PMO to monitor social media commentary on the government and its achievements.
Phase 2 began in May and involved getting onto Twitter hitherto under-represented ministries like civil aviation under Ashok Gajapati Raju. The PMO also scrupulously monitored the performance. Nonoutcome-based tweets like people met or places visited would not qualify. Only tweets directly impacting governance and people, as also the public response, made the cut. Modi’s social media outlook, key PMO officials explain, revolves around four precepts: engaging people through the ministers’ social citizen-centric media interaction on governance issues and projecting the government as a single entity in the public eye; keeping ministers and the bureaucracy on their toes vis-a-vis performance; giving ministers a chance to share decisions of other ministries to kindle a ‘Team NDA spirit’; and, finally, affording people an opportunity to rate ministerial performances.
The PMO organised three day-long training sessions of ministers and key officers in April and May this year after the experiment was launched to finetune the exercise. The dos and don’ts on tweets were discussed as also the fact that a monitoring system had been organised. All the data collected on #transformingindia are stored in transformingindia.mygov.in (Transforming India is a division under MyGov).
In June, the PM began a weekly internal rating of each minister on the basis of their Twitter and
Facebook performance on three outcome-based scores: positive, negative and neutral.
“The 2014 general elections firmly laid the foundation of digital governance. Social media, with its egalitarian nature, opens up the doors for listening to citizens and engaging and responding to them, which is one dimension of the Digital India initiative. That the PMO is engaging in an exercise to prepare a report card of ministers’ social media engagement is a welcome step and the learnings will benefit all,” says Rajesh Lalwani, CEO, Scenario Consulting, a brand marketing firm.
HOW THE RANKING WORKS
In a modest office, a dedicated team tracks every minister on his/her Twitter and Facebook account almost on a day-to-day basis. They monitor public reactions to each minister’s tweets and the quality of content. The tracking shows most and least trending regions, which indicates in which region people are engaging the most and in which the least. The tracking also reveals the topics people show the most interest in. A score sheet with every minister’s ratings lands in the PMO every week.
A PMO official prefers to call it a “mindset changing exercise” rather than a performance-evaluation exercise. “It is to put pressure on ministers to engage with people on governance issues and also in turn goad the bureaucracy to work harder.” One good that has come out of the social media move is a scramble among ministers to look good on it. Minister of state for external affairs General V.K. Singh (retired), who lost a second ministry in the July 5 reshuffle, for instance, flew down into Juba, south Sudan, to personally supervise the evacuation of the 600-odd Indian nationals there, even tweeting a short video of him interacting with them aboard an IAF C-17. On July 15, Union tourism minister Mahesh Sharma tweeted to dispel the public perception that arrivals were down—it seems there’s been a three-fold rise in e-tourist visa arrivals, 0.47 million, in the first half of 2016.
Modi, in keeping with his style of encouraging intracabinet competition, also occasionally retweets some of his cabinet colleagues’ (22 this month) pronouncements. One of them was Union health minister J.P. Nadda’s tweet on India being felicitated by Unicef for eliminating maternity and neo-natal tetanus.
The Twitter initiative also allows ministers instant feedback from people. For instance, when new MoS for civil aviation Jayant Sinha tweeted on July 14 that passengers will have to pay less for cancellation charges from August 1, a flier alerted him on the premium levied on window and aisle seats till row 20.
A PMO official calls the monitoring more about “doing things systematically”. “It is more about inter-ministerial coordination and communication and breaking the silos in which the ministries used to work besides maintaining an all-encompassing interface with the people on governance,” he says. “More than anything else, it is a live government-to-people platform for sharing government initiatives and allowing people to come back with their views. It allows people to express their opinion while also giving the government an idea of where they are going right, or wrong,” adds Gaurav Dwivedi, IAS, CEO of MyGov, under which the Transforming India portal functions.
Tweets are, of course, met with a healthy dose of scepticism. Minister of state for commerce and industry Nirmala Sitharaman’s tweet early this month about Rs 12,000 crore being earmarked to train one crore people in skill development elicited tweets about the challenges in monitoring government bodies tasked with execution at the ground level.
Ministers also now routinely announce policy decisions on Twitter. Prime Minister Modi tweeted a big change in FDI policy soon after it was announced last month. Finance minister Arun Jaitley recently shared the government’s crucial decision to revive defunct fertiliser units in Sindri in Jharkhand, Barauni in Bihar and Gorakhpur in UP.
The public engagement has also seen a rise in the number of followers for ministers. Union minister for food and public distribution Ramvilas Paswan has already jumped to 0.18 million followers from just 21,400 in March. Other Union ministers, including Harsimrat Kaur Badal, Kalraj Mishra, Narendra Tomar and Thawar Chand Gehlot, have also seen followers double and treble, matching their Twitter activity. A new national constituency for the political class to address.