Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations (25 page)

If you want to persuade someone to vote for you, they need to know who you are, which political party you are affiliated with and what your ideology and campaign platform are all about. This kind of awareness-building is easier if the candidate already has a fairly high local profile. In Nandan’s case, however, we had the unique challenge of a candidate who was well known both nationally and internationally, but a relative cipher to the voters of South Bangalore. Initial testing revealed that people across socio-economic groups had heard of Infosys and Aadhaar, but had no idea that Nandan was closely involved with either; many of them didn’t even recognize his name.

As a candidate, Nandan always strove to build a one-on-one connect with each voter. How could we maintain the intimacy of such a dialogue on a constituency-wide scale? The campaign did several things to introduce Nandan to the voters of Bangalore South, including messaging through traditional media, social media, and personalized letters. Each letter greeted the resident by name before introducing Nandan, listing his past achievements and explaining his vision for building a better Bangalore. A small tear-away section at the bottom
of the letter contained such useful information as the location of the individual’s polling station and their serial number on the voter list. We heard back from a number of people who were deeply impressed at receiving a personal letter from a candidate.

We conducted polls to measure the effectiveness of all these strategies at boosting awareness of Nandan as a candidate. Starting at an unhappy low of 25 per cent, we saw awareness registering a massive jump over time, reaching around 80 per cent by the time election day came around. It was technology and data analytics that powered this leap, allowing us to choose the media and the message likely to have the greatest impact and then monitoring the results in real time.

Once people knew who Nandan was, what he had achieved so far and what he hoped to do for Bangalore South, we now had to tackle the challenging task of persuading people to vote for him. Volunteers called the residents of Bangalore South through call centres, familiarizing them with Nandan’s biography and emphasizing the local connect, starting with the fact that he was born in Bangalore South. In the later stages of the campaign, the live calls were complemented by automated phone calls that played a pre-recorded message from Nandan urging people to cast their vote in his favour. We ran polls alongside to measure how effective these strategies were.

Party workers from the Congress swept through neighbourhoods, visiting as many houses as possible, talking to the residents about Nandan’s candidacy, asking them what issues they faced in their locality, and collecting their phone numbers in case they wished to be contacted further. The same task also fell to the lot of the volunteer group that emerged to support Nandan’s cause, who called themselves ‘Together with Nandan’, or TWN. The TWN volunteer army had over 1500 foot soldiers, with 300 people fanning out into every nook and cranny of Bangalore South in the last month before the election. They were an eclectic lot—some of them were college students, others were former colleagues from Infosys or the UIDAI. Saroja Yeramilli, the TWN
coordinator, quit her position at Dell to join the campaign; Meeta Karanth postponed her start date at McKinsey Consulting. We even had celebrity endorsements from such well-known Kannadigas as the actor, director and playwright Girish Karnad.

None of the TWN members were politically motivated; all of them had joined the effort only because they supported Nandan’s candidacy, and worked without any pay for their efforts. In fact, many of them had no background in election campaigning whatsoever; one star TWN field worker, Kavitha, was a housewife who always took her little daughter Sahana along when knocking on doors, reasoning correctly that people would be more willing to talk to a lady with a young child perched on her hip. Sahana eventually became the TWN mascot, and could reel off the entire ‘sales pitch’ flawlessly, much to everyone’s amusement, admonishing people in her sweet three-year-old lisp to ‘Vote for Nandan, okay?’ TWN members coordinated their activities using social media, especially WhatsApp, and used mobile apps to record voter interactions and maintain records of all the houses they visited. Some of the TWN members also came up with fresh ideas to persuade voters, like the flash mob that danced to popular film music at the Royal Meenakshi Mall in South Bangalore while wearing TWN T-shirts, finishing up their performance by exhorting the curious onlookers to vote for Nandan.

As Congress party workers and TWN volunteers conducted an extensive field campaign, Nandan too embarked on a punishing schedule of public meetings and padayatras, touring various parts of the constituency, meeting the local leaders as well as the people of the area. We gathered data from each of these activities to check their effectiveness, and ran polls to continuously gauge the health of the campaign. We also reposted photos of these events on Nandan’s Facebook and Twitter pages, further amplifying the media coverage.

The final stage of a campaign is the turnout phase, which begins two days before voting day. At this point, all campaigning stops, and the
entire effort now boils down to ensuring that supporters come to the polling stations to cast their votes. Once Nandan’s campaign reached this phase, the technology team built an extremely simple voter lookup tool. This tool was nothing more than the digital electoral roll in a searchable format; entering a person’s name or voter ID number into a bare-bones, text-based search box accessible over the internet drew up their entire voter record, including their serial number and the name and address of the polling station where they were supposed to vote.

On election day, political parties usually set up tables outside each polling booth with a copy of the voter roll. Party workers help voters to find their name and serial number on the list so that they can vote. Given the number of errors that the voter roll is riddled with, it isn’t surprising that many people can’t find their names, and have no idea whether they are even at the correct polling booth.

The day Bangalore went to the polls, 17 April 2015, we sent TWN volunteers to polling booths across the constituency, hoping to assist party workers in looking up voters. The data collected during the awareness and persuasion phases of the campaign revealed which locations needed a little extra push in terms of getting voters to the booths on D-day, and that’s where our volunteers went. Regunath, principal architect at Flipkart and a TWN volunteer, told us what happened next:

I got to the booth, and there was this gentleman standing at one of the tables looking really upset. The party worker was trying to find his name in the voter rolls, but it wasn’t there. The man was getting very annoyed because he wanted to vote and didn’t know what to do now. I asked him for his voter ID and entered his number on the voter look-up tool on my phone. In a few seconds I got his entire information, and saw that he was at the wrong place—according to his record, he was supposed to be voting at a different booth. I told him where to go and he was quite grateful. Soon, the party workers were directing more and more people to me.

Party workers seized upon the look-up portal as a brilliant tool for making their job easier. All it required was one person with a
smartphone; it was so easy to use that people were training each other on the fly, and eventually everyone was using the app by the end of polling day, irrespective of which political party they were affiliated with. Even by conservative estimates, we were able to help hundreds of people cast their vote that day instead of them being forced to return home without being able to exercise one of their most fundamental democratic rights.

Despite these and many other technological innovations that the campaign came up with, Nandan ended up losing the election to Ananth Kumar, the BJP candidate and six-time member of Parliament from Bangalore South. While Nandan polled more votes than the Congress candidate in the previous general election,
⁹
the campaign could not overcome the ‘Modi wave’ that swept the nation. The strong anti-incumbency sentiment that prevailed during the elections led many voters to tell us that Nandan was the right man, but in the wrong party. Ultimately, technology can only take you so far; it is the pulse of the people that finally decides which leader gets elected to office.

Where do we see Indian elections evolving in the future? Truly speaking, political parties have always been brands, with a central message, a symbol, and loyal adherents. The party symbol and its ideology are inextricably linked, and based on these, people build expectations of what the party can do for them if elected to power. We believe that in the future, parties will begin to recognize and tap into the value of this brand, a process that has already begun. Rather than just offering a ticket and a symbol to the candidate, parties will now offer them an entire campaign outline, structured around the party’s ideology and core strengths—what we refer to as the ‘party as a platform’ concept.

What will this platform consist of? For one, candidates will be given a strong central message which all of them can use, with some local customization. With their large budget, parties can ensure that the message stays consistent across the country, an approach that was
most successfully employed by Narendra Modi and to a certain extent by the AAP in Delhi. Funds can be raised on the basis of the party’s brand, and technology helps to log and utilize even the smallest of donations, as the AAP’s fundraising campaign demonstrated so ably.

The platform will also offer a set of technology-based tools that candidates can access: digitized voter lists, voter look-up services for party workers, social media engagement, call centre management, 3D hologram rallies, and so on.

All these technological innovations were deployed in the 2014 elections, and should soon enter the mainstream of Indian politics. The trend of political parties increasingly providing a set of tools, or an integrated launch platform to their candidates, will only accelerate in future elections. Candidates that can combine strong grassroots support with a party-supplied platform will naturally have an edge over old-style politics.

Most importantly, we predict that future general elections will be ‘mobile first’; over 500 million Indians will have smartphones in the next few years, and election campaigns will depend heavily on the mobile phone network to reach out to voters, even more than they do now. Parties that successfully implement the ‘party as a platform’ concept will have much more to offer to their candidates and voters, and will change the relationship between the party and the candidate. Today, parties offer candidates mindshare in the form of messaging and feet on the street. Once they can offer intellectual property in the form of software and a trained party base that can work with that software, the bargaining power between the party and the candidate will change in favour of the party. Such a strategy has been employed in other countries as well. In the US, every candidate of the Democratic party uses products from the technology company NGP VAN to manage their campaigns, whether it’s an election to choose the next president or the head of the local labour union.
¹⁰

In the Darwinian world of Indian politics, all the players will have to embrace and exploit the power and reach of technology if they want to survive.

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.

—John Maynard Keynes, 1926

VETTATH SHANKARAN REPRESENTS a new breed of fisherman. Once upon a time, Shankaran used to rely on luck and experience to decide where to cast his fishing net on the high seas. Now, a network of satellites 20,000 kilometres above the earth feeds data into the Global Positioning System (GPS) installed on his boat, telling him where a good catch is likely to be found. In an earlier age, Shankaran would not be able to gauge where he could get the best price for his fish—if his fellow fishermen had also had a successful expedition, prices at his home market would fall. He could try sailing to other locations on the coast, but he had no guarantee that his fish would fetch him a better price there. Now, Shankaran and his associates simply call markets from Kottayam to Thrissur, negotiating the best price for their catch so that, ‘by the time we reach the shores, our business deal has been settled’, he says.
¹

The changes wrought by mobile telephones on the business
fortunes of Shankaran and his ilk were the subject of a landmark study by Harvard economist Robert Jensen.
²
He found that on average, consumers now paid 4 per cent less for their fish while the fishermen’s average profit went up by 8 per cent; waste had been eliminated, markets had become efficient and fish were now uniformly priced across the region—what economists call the ‘law of one price’. Follow-up studies found that fishermen credited their phones with more than just improving their income; they ‘used their phones to maintain relations within and outside the market, and protected themselves during times of risk, vulnerability and emergency’.
³

Certainly, when the Indian government threw open the telecom sector to private players to usher in mobile telephony, nobody could have anticipated that Kerala’s fish economy would receive a substantial boost. But that the introduction of a new technology can have unexpected and beneficial consequences is a hallmark of the innovation economy. By throwing technology open to the public and bringing in players across the public–private spectrum, governments can spur growth and development in myriad new ways. Once, all telephony services in India were monopolized by state-owned corporations such as Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited. Today, the government’s primary role is no longer of a service provider with a cradle-to-the-grave approach, building telecom switches and handing out telephone instruments to subscribers. Instead, the government has defined rules for telecom companies, and established regulators like the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, which ensure that laws are followed and consumer interests are protected. By taking a minimalist approach, in which private-sector participation competes in a regulated environment, the government has helped to make India’s mobile phone network among the world’s largest and cheapest.

Our marketplaces are in the midst of a revolution. The falling prices of smartphones and data services have led to new business models, which use the internet and information services to challenge existing players in fields ranging from retail to transportation. Traditional government domains are now being invaded by the private sector. The rise of the sharing economy, in
which people directly share resources with one another, is further changing our understanding of business. In a time of such rapid change, government faces the challenge of implementing regulatory standards and protecting consumer rights in an ever-changing landscape. The mobile telephony network was among the first wave of technologies that required such efforts from the government. Let’s see how some of the newer challenges are shaping up.

When Uber made its Indian debut in 2013, it became one of a clutch of taxi services debuting an unfamiliar business model. Instead of calling a central number, you could book a taxi using an app on a smartphone, track its location and arrival time via GPS, and pay via a credit card online. People were enthralled by the experience, and Uber experienced a surge in popularity.

However, this auspicious beginning was soon marred by regulatory troubles. First, the Reserve Bank of India objected to Uber’s payment model, which violated the RBI mandate of a two-factor authentication for all credit card payments—designed to increase transaction security and reduce fraud. Uber initially managed to avoid this requirement by routing payments through a foreign gateway, since foreign exchange payments are exempt from the RBI’s authentication rules. However, the RBI demanded that Uber either follow the same rules that applied to India-based taxi service providers or shut shop.
⁴

Worse was to follow. In December 2014, an Uber driver in New Delhi was accused of raping a female passenger. The government responded by banning Uber in the capital region, and the events that followed conclusively proved that a ‘service aggregator’ like Uber, which claimed to only be a platform connecting drivers with riders rather than a commercial taxi service, occupied a regulatory grey zone.
⁵
Whose responsibility was it to ensure that Uber drivers had passed police verification checks? While the rules were clearer for commercial taxi services, what were the obligations for an aggregator like Uber, and could it truly claim to offer a safe and secure service
to its customers? More troubling facts soon came to light. The driver was a habitual offender, but had managed to obtain a police verification certificate that authorities claimed was forged.
⁶
He had registered with Uber under a false name, and prior to assaulting his passenger, he simply switched off the app on his phone tracking the ride. Given that Uber was operating in India as a technology company rather than as a transportation business, whose job was it to monitor these safety norms and take action when they were flouted? Whether or not banning the service completely was warranted, it served no purpose unless it was also accompanied by the introduction of rules and regulations designed specifically to apply to service aggregators.
⁷

Uber is not India’s only service aggregator. Thanks to Airbnb, anyone can convert a spare room into a hotel without complying with hospitality industry regulations. eBay allows people to freely buy and sell goods from each other. All these services work as platforms, with buyers and sellers rating each other—a reputation that builds up over multiple transactions, making customers more inclined to use a service. Normally, this would require a regulator. Existing operators who bear regulatory costs—New York city taxi drivers who pay large sums to get a medallion, or hotels that meet regulatory requirements, making them more expensive—find disruptions such as Airbnb and Uber hard to compete with as they grow popular. Often, the new business models are different enough that they end up avoiding existing taxes. The incumbents label the newcomers as ‘tax evaders’ and the new solutions as ‘unsafe’. There is also the risk of the existing interests lobbying against innovations and using regulations to create a barrier to entry. In all these cases, the conflict between regulation and innovation has led to considerable friction in the market.

The sharing economy is also giving rise to a new class of ‘micro-entrepreneurs’—small-scale service providers who can now find customers through an online marketplace.
⁸
The US has seen the emergence of a plethora of start-ups that will bring you groceries and flowers, wash your clothes, deliver meals, clean your house, carry out your personal tasks, or send a doctor to your home if you’re ill. You can hire a talented designer over the internet to create a logo for
your company, or find consultants to tackle a challenging problem at work.
⁹
In urban India, you can now use apps to find cooks, cleaners and plumbers in your locality. There is a start-up for every possible opportunity that exists of organizing the unorganized. A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute points out that ‘India is a nation of small-scale, independent service providers’ and by building digital marketplaces, these service providers can broaden their customer base and scale up for growth, whether they are graphic designers, nurses or carpenters.
¹⁰
Such collaborative platforms redefine the relationship between employer and employee, and the regulatory framework that supports this relationship—tax laws, employment laws, worker rights—needs to reshape itself.

The sharing economy and the services built around it are here to stay. One estimate places its current global value at $15 billion, a number projected to rise steadily.
¹¹
It draws from both public and private resources, such as the internet, GPS and mapping services, as well as privately developed payment systems—credit cards, mobile wallets and the like, and depends heavily on establishing a culture of trust and reciprocity, whether that is through obtaining favourable reviews or conducting background checks when needed. We need to be ahead of the curve when it comes to building the regulatory frameworks that will allow such collaborative services to flourish while safeguarding the rights of the people.

Those who pioneer new business models in India will need to adapt our regulatory frameworks, given that the state’s capacity to manage law and order and guarantee citizen safety may be inadequate. For example, taxi service providers may be required to build stronger safety platforms. This might mean that they run their own verification checks in addition to following the mandated requirements, ensure that only registered drivers operate vehicles, and that the tracking app on the driver’s phone cannot be switched off while a ride is in progress. Some services have launched alert notifications, like Ola’s SOS feature; in an ideal world, such a feature would be directly linked to the local police system. While transport service aggregators may be making the headlines right now for their regulatory troubles, it is naive to
assume that such issues will not arise in other areas of business. The government needs to be prepared.

In her book
The Entrepreneurial State
, the economist Mariana Mazzucato offers an interesting perspective on the state funding of innovation.
¹²
Agencies such as the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and others have a history of funding basic research at universities and research labs, often at a nascent stage where the risks are high enough to discourage investment from venture capitalists. This approach has helped to support some of the biggest technological and scientific breakthroughs of our time—consider that the development of the internet, the human genome project, nuclear technology, antibiotics and GPS have all benefited from early government support. Discussing the enormously popular products that came out of Apple under the leadership of Steve Jobs, Mazzucato says, ‘The genius . . . of Steve Jobs led to massive profits and success, largely because Apple was able to ride the wave of massive state investments in the revolutionary technologies that underpin the iPhone and iPad: the internet, GPS, touchscreen displays and communication technologies. Without these publicly funded technologies, there would have been no wave to . . . surf.’

One particular example of the government funding of cutting-edge research is familiar to us. Along with his colleagues Jeff Bezanson, Alan Edelman and Stefan Karpinski, Viral is a co-inventor of the Julia programming language. Julia is an open-source, high-performance programming language under development since 2009. It is commonly used by scientists in the physical and social sciences, engineers and data scientists for diverse purposes ranging from exploring the secrets of the universe to teasing out new insights from big data. While Julia is itself an open-source project that received contributions from scores of programmers worldwide, it has benefited from government research funding at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from
US government agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Given the fact that the commercial prospects of a new programming language at the point of conception are almost nil in today’s world unless it is backed by a large company such as Google, Apple or Microsoft, it was unlikely that any investor would choose to invest in such a project. However, open-source contributions and government funding kick-started the project and have led to its maturity, to a point where universities around the world now teach Julia in classrooms, and companies use it extensively.

While government funding has been a key component of technological innovation, some of the resulting discoveries have ended up posing an unexpected challenge to government itself. For example, the era of the internet has helped to make public the kind of information traditionally restricted to the government domain, and the blurring of the boundary between governments and their citizens have led to conflict on both sides of the divide—the brouhaha around WikiLeaks is an excellent example, even though not all the information leaked was particularly sensitive or revelatory. When applications start to use this information for general use, new regulatory issues arise.

A particularly interesting case is that of Google Maps, a breakthrough when it was first introduced. Over the years it has become increasingly sophisticated, and hundreds of millions of people rely on it daily. But at every step, it has run afoul of various rules and regulations. The first contentious issue that Google Maps had to deal with was the highly charged subject of political boundaries. How does a mapping service accessible to anyone in the world display disputed international boundaries? Today, based on the internet address from where the request originates, Google displays a version of the map consistent with local law. Over the years, a number of issues have surfaced: the marking of sensitive areas on maps, such as military installations, and privacy and security concerns with the Google Street View service. Here we have a piece of technology that consumers love, but is simply too new and too innovative for regulatory processes to maintain pace. A knee-jerk response by many governments is to bring up sovereignty
concerns, and ban innovation. For instance, the Survey of India has long enjoyed a government-endowed monopoly on the business of making maps in India, and we have seen them being openly hostile to innovative products like Google Maps. Private weather forecasters like Skymet and the Bangalore-based Citizen Weather Network are entering a domain that was until recently the exclusive preserve of the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD).
¹³
The holy grail of weather forecasting in India is predicting the onset of the annual monsoon season, and Skymet has already clashed with the IMD by releasing monsoon predictions and analyses that differ from the IMD’s interpretation.
¹⁴