Gauravonomics Blog

Welcome back to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!

Vote Report India was featured today in a Deccan Herald story on the use of digital technologies in the Indian elections.

The story also quotes me extensively on why the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections are turning out to be India’s first digital elections.

In my series on the 2009 Indian elections, I have been writing about election-related internet and mobile initiatives from political parties, civil society organizations, media houses and corporates and tracking the reactions they have generated online.

Here is the full text of the story –

Campaigning virtually
Click and read
The impact of Internet and mobile technologies on the election campaign has been immense. Metrolife takes a look at the digital initiatives

Most of us at some point or the other have been guilty of whiling away time in front of the social networking sites, exploring profiles with the only legitimate contribution of increasing the hit rate of the sites. But did you ever imagine that the same exercise could end up making us a responsible citizen and an informed voter?
The urban youth is fast taking to the digital media as a means of gathering information on election, so the political parties are pulling up their socks and catering to this cross-section for the month-long general elections to the 15th Lok Sabha.  Read More

The world’s largest democracy, India, goes to election starting April 16, 2009. The month long general elections to the 15th Lok Sabha will be held in five phases on April 16, April 22/ 23, April 30, May 7 and May 13, and the results will be announced on May 16.

As India’s 714 million voters prepare to elect their 543 representatives, they are witness to a range of digital initiatives from political parties, civil society organizations, media houses and even corporates. As a result, some observers are calling it India’s first digital elections.

Leading from the front is 82 year old Lal Krishna Advani, the prime ministerial candidate of the right wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, who has embarked on a Obama style new media campaign. Part of the campaign are a blog, a blogger outreach program, one of the most aggressive online ad campaigns ever seen in India, and an aggressive SMS campaign that will reach 250 million of India’s 400 million mobile subscribers. Rajesh Jain’s Netcore Solutions, which is running the SMS campaign for BJP, has bought an inventory of 1 billion SMSes for the campaign. Rajesh is also a part of the Friends of BJP group, which is running a social network and an opt-in MyToday-based SMS channel to support BJP’s campaign (Indian Express).  Read More

I’m starting off the Global Voices special coverage on the 2009 Indian general elections by analyzing how internet and mobile technologies are transforming election campaigning in India.

Politics in India is essentially local and India’s voters elect their representatives based on small local and regional issues, instead of the big national issues. As a result, election rallies and door-to-door canvassing, supplemented by local hoardings and print ads in the vernacular languages have traditionally been at the core of election campaigning in India.

In 2004, the incumbent BJP broke away from this pattern with its aggressive nation-wide ‘India Shining’ campaign. It recruited advertising and PR agencies to manage its campaign, focused on the urban first time voter, advertised heavily on print and television, and allocated 5% of its campaign budget to an e-campaign, for revamping its campaign website, pushing out text messages, pre-recorded voice clips and emails to its database of 20 million email users and 20 million phone users, and offering campaign-related mobile ringtones for download (BBC/ BBC/ Rediff/ Hindu). The ‘India Shining’ campaign didn’t work eventually, and Sonia Gandhi led Congress to a surprise victory, once again reaffirming the almost magical appeal of the Nehru-Gandhi family amongst India’s voters. Many observers even attributed BJP’s loss to its “elitist” ‘India Shining’ campaign (Live Mint).  Read More

One of my seven social media predictions for India for 2009 was that social media will play an important role in the 2009 Indian general elections.

Young people in India are more engaged with politics than ever in the aftermath of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack and this engagement will carry through to the 2009 elections.

I believe that we will see an unprecedented amount of online debate on the many problems facing India and even specific political parties and candidates. We will also see a serious “get out the vote” campaign to get more young people to go out to vote. We will also see some politicians experiment with social media tools, hoping to replicate the magic of Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign. The Lok Sabha elections for 2009 may even produce India’s first tech Prime Minister.

I think that we saw the first tentative steps in that direction when BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani started a blog yesterday (via Soumyadeep).

The first blog post talks about how he has seen election campaigning change between 1952 and 2009 and explains his reasons for starting a blog –  Read More