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).
Other parties are also running similar mobile campaign and, overall, telecom operators expect to make an additional revenue of $10 million from an extra traffic of 3-4 billion SMSes sent by all the political parties, apart from money from multimedia messages, songs and wallpapers (Economic Times).
Several civil society campaigns are also using mobile technology in interesting ways.
The Jaago Re campaign was launched by Tata Tea and Janaagraha in September 2008 to start a voter registration drive in colleges and corporates in 35 cities across the country and register four million voters.
The voter registration itself is driven through an interactive application on its website, which helps users identify their constituency, prepares a ready to print voter registration form in five minutes, guides them to the nearest voter registration center and updates them via SMS when their names are added to the voting list.
Jaago Re has turned out to be an extremely successful campaign. Not only has it been a topic of a huge number of news stories and blog posts, and resulted in much goodwill for Tata Tea, it has also managed to register 584,000 voters so far.
Idea Cellular‘s My Idea campaign is a continuation of its participatory democracy ad campaign where a lady politician, aided by her tech-savvy assistant Abhishek Bachchan, gathers the views of the citizens in her constituency using mobile phones –
The campaign asks people to submit an idea that can change India and vote on the ideas submitted by others. So far, more than 3,000 ideas have been submitted and more than 170,000 votes have been cast.
Vote Report India, a project I’m personally involved in, is a collaborative citizen-powered election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections.
Users contribute direct SMS, email, Twitter and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct. The platform aggregates these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map.
Vote Report India aims to not only increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process, but also provide the most complete picture of public opinion in India during the month long elections.
Vote Report India is built on the Ushahidi and Swift platforms and managed by eMoksha, a non-profit organization that aims to enable stronger democracies through increased citizen awareness and engagement.
Mobile technology is playing a small but important role in the Indian Lok Sabha elections. Even as the media focus is on the web 2.0 elements in the digital election-related initiatives, it’s the lowly SMS that is likely to make the most difference.
A slightly edited version of this post was cross-posted in MobileActive.
