Mumbai Votes

I think, if it gets to the point that this information really starts hurting the political establishment, there can be certain obstacles. It has been seen as a nascent but important enough threat to them to raise an alarm. The mere act of just shining the light upon their incompetence in some cases has great ramifications on their political future. There has been a certain sense of defensiveness that has become palpable. They realize how transparent this movement is. It is currently seen as a threat to them, rather than an opportunity to showcase their capability of providing the kind of legislation that the city demands. Because of that perception of theirs, it becomes difficult to get a constant stream of video-interviews or appointments on time.

And another obstacle would be if they threaten or harm any of our volunteers or me! Not that it will deter us, but that would make college students think twice before they get on board.

There is only one plan - the INDIAN RAILWAYS!(laughs) I didn’t get here to escape, but there are political ramifications. However, what is equally true is that the hurt sentiments are also temporary. I don’t think a lot of politicians would act upon their impulsive feelings of momentary anger at Mumbai Votes if it prevented them from getting elected. But, how can one really guard against somebody really becoming vicious, and doing something hostile - how can somebody really stop that? I don’t really have any plan to overcome that.

It is aiming to overcome the problem of a lack of clear information being communicated from the political establishment to the citizens regarding what they have done to address the campaign promises that were made before the elections. That brings in the need to be informed, so any individual can assess what his/her elected representative is doing/or has done on the job that they vie for with such fervor during elections. Are they doing justice to the vote that was cast in their favor?

When information can tarnish reputations, and lay threadbare, the incompetence of politicians into the public domain, there can be severe repercussions on the future of those who have been incompetent. There has been a throttling of information - an invisible nexus between the political establishment and the election commission where both seem to be working in unison to ensure that, prior to election, there isn’t adequate time to research your candidate, thereby making a smooth launchpad for politicians, who do not truly deserve to get votes.

Well, because I didn’t think anybody else was going to do it!

Partly, yes. The government certainly should provide a part of this information. But, it’s like the function of journalism – this information can never really be fulfilled by insiders. An unbiased citizen-based body needs to exist, irrespective of the information that the government provides you. I think that scrutiny is essential and should persist, even in the presence of an official channel of information. But I do believe that we are doing the government’s job. We are unearthing public information, or information that should be clearly available in the public domain. This information needs to be intricately carved out from their vast repository, such as, the parliament’s website, which does exist in the public domain but it's so unwieldy! It’s almost designed for you to be unable to go through! Even if you go through it, you might not come back out alive. The information is so labyrinthine. It is incredible.

It severely destabilizes the status quo. There is a lot of incompetence and lack of clear thinking among our elected representatives, and that would become explicitly clear if this information were to get out. That is what they are trying to withhold. They will not have a clear platform for playing identity politics and politics of other kinds, which in my opinion don’t have much merit. But they continue thriving on those issues by suppressing and subverting the true developmental issues that should be highlighted. It’s comfortable this way for them.

It turns into offline change by the mere act of the people, who now go to vote – they don’t throw a dart in the dark and walk out nibbling their nails, wondering if they voted for the right person. It’s direct offline change, as it results in offline voting. It also provides fodder for good conversation among peers, be it at the work place, in the college canteen or the family living room. What it then does is start creating a sense of entitlement, a sense of being a deserving citizen, where you start demanding this kind of information. It raises the quality of governance, which we feel we are entitled to, and feel we deserve. It brings up the whole idea of quality in a very important aspect of our lives.

One thing about an activity or an endeavor such as this is, you might not have a way of assessing why things are changing even when you see change happen, though there can always be hypotheses. There can be a correlation between what we are doing and the tangible change that we see in the outside world. I don’t think I can unequivocally establish a cause and effect relationship - I can just look at correlations and say, for instance, in the last two elections that we have covered, we have made it very easy to unearth the pending criminal case records of every candidate and elected representative in Mumbai, along with analyzing it, using a scale of gravity of punishment for various offences that they might have been charged for. That makes it very clear for a person to understand the criminal propensity of a candidate or a sitting representative, and to see to it. They didn’t get voted into power the next time. This could be because of the information that Mumbai Votes put out, or there might be other factors working as well.

But, there definitely has been a trend of lower percentages of candidates with criminal records getting elected into power. Also, social movements trying to address low voter turnout have diagnosed the problem as one of voter registration - where registration system is very unwieldy, bureaucratic and sluggish, discouraging people from registering to vote. This has been their assumption. Based on the feedback that I get from the users of Mumbai Votes, I have sensed a very tangible impact. Actually, a lot of them weren’t voting, not because they didn’t have a voter ID card or weren’t registered, but rather because they felt that their vote was meaningless and wasn’t going to tilt the scales in any favor. There was a belief that the same caliber of politicians would keep returning and, besides, they didn't know who the candidates were. There is no such excuse for voters anymore. They can now vote with information. And that has - even though the numbers don’t bear it - propped up the voter turnout in Mumbai.

For the last one year, it has been 50-60 hours, at least. But the idea now, is to create a self-sustaining structure, where I divulge a little control and let Mumbai Votes out of my very closely guarded control, because I feel that its essence will get mutilated the moment it leaves the very tight control of my hands. I haven’t allowed anybody to touch the philosophy of Mumbai Votes.
You can say, paradoxically that there isn’t complete democracy within Mumbai Votes. I don’t want to let that remain a defining feature. I am looking to build a management structure around it where people who have understood what Mumbai Votes’ core purpose of existence is take on a more managerial role. They will take on the entire research, analysis and communication areas of the project. I expect to reduce my number of hours to 15-20 hours a week.

Around 10-12 hours a week, on a sustained basis.

By far, conducting video interviews of elected representatives and making appointments to conduct these interviews has been the most time consuming task. Researching the coverage of newspapers that don't have their contents archived online has been another one. We have not given up on newspapers that aren't archived online. Very pertinent information about very local issues is found only in such papers. Photographing the articles, going to the locations where these archives are, and unearthing this information is very time consuming.

All the data that we collect, is used to establish a baseline of an elected representative’s own-stated position about various issues. Every newspaper article that appears about every MP, MLA or Corporator, which defines that person’s or party’s position on various political and public issues is used as the baseline for assessing their campaign promises versus their actual performance - what we call "consistency vs inconsistency." Every statement adds to the baseline and is also used to assess whether it is consistent with the baseline or not. It is a constantly evolving baseline, which includes the manifestos, the annual interviews that are conducted, etc. Our assessment is directly done from extracts of the reportage that we do, through our video interviews and other content analyses. We actually do coding, conduct inter-code reliability processes, and ensure that our coding procedure is worthy, and numbers resulting from it are truly meaningful.

We have a team of MBA students, who are developing a social media marketing strategy, where Mumbai Votes can publish a semi-annual analytical report. These reports will then be circulated among citizens and organizations all over Mumbai, through channels like Karmyog and umbrella NGOs like the Association for Democratic Reform, AGNI, and others. We want to make this content available to everyone, and hopefully start a tradition of an annual MP, MLA and corporator debate, which are filmed and possibly disseminated through podcast. The elected representatives will be presented with this analysis. It will become the fulcrum for an intelligent debate about what our assessment of their last years performance has been, and build from there, a roadmap for the forthcoming year.

There is no login module right now, so we can’t identify. Another option could have been a blog, but I am very clear that Mumbai Votes will never have a blog, where people can voice their views about politicians and political issues. That was exactly the genesis of Mumbai Votes - there are so many opinions in our politics but not enough clear and crisp assessment. We don’t seek to have two-way conversation with the users of Mumbai Votes but with our elected representatives.

Our processes and methodology are up for debate though, and the users can help us improve.

In the past we have relied on a lot of gratis support from media institutions who have very generously projected or published our videos and content on their screens all over Mumbai.

• There is a group called, ‘Out of Home’ (OOH) Media that has given us a lot of guided support.
• There have been radio stations that have, completely free of charge, spread the word about Mumbai Votes.
• In addition, we do a lot of person-to-person marketing, where our entire team descends on the streets, promenades and coffee shops of Mumbai, and we engage people on a one-to-one basis. We especially do this prior to elections by just posing a very simple questionL ‘Excuse me, are you going to vote in the upcoming election?’ Just a conversation! That quality of contact is so good that they then become ambassadors of Mumbai Votes in their Housing Societies.
• And yes, one very important channel to attract new users is, Jaagore-Janaagraha. They have been a very big supporter of Mumbai Votes. They have a database of over 130,000 registrants. We have been using their channels as well to tell people about the available quality of information on Mumbai Votes, and to give them regular updates.

I think that Janaagraha has certainly been very effective. After t26/11 (the November 2006 terror attacks in Mumbai), there was a lot of interest generated in civic participation and democracy, though all the interest proved to be very temporary!. At that time, there were a lot of TV stations and newspapers covering Mumbai Votes. Every time a newspaper would write something about us, there would be a direct impact the next day – more than 4000 people would visit the website. Those were surges, of course! After that, there has been a more sustained kind of audience for Mumbai Votes. It has achieved a credible mass and the word-of-mouth is spreading.

For volunteers (mostly journalism students), it encourages them to apply a lot of the theories and principles, which they learn in their journalism programs about how to do social science research: how you read for opinion-based sentences in news reportage, how you use news articles as sources which very often have a bias/slant as material for conducting an unbiased assessment. So, it helps them practice these principles. It leads them to learn to think critically, and to become self-sufficient individuals. It is an incentive for a lot of people, who are about to step into the workforce and are required to perform very complex tasks of management and critical thinking.

We look for students who have done political/social science research to do the coding of media coverage.

We need people who can edit videos, understand technology really well, people who understand web design and IT management. Those are some of the core skills. It is a completely diffused project that does not requiring complex software. We have people working in different parts of the city and we use Google Docs to update information and give instructions to each other. So those skills - and, yes, we also need good communication skills, people who can write things that are not just ‘text messages’! It is hard to get people like that, though. I have to tell people several times, that life is not a long text message!

We have been blessed with quite a few individuals in Mumbai who, after the 26/11 attacks, decided to come forward with support. I don’t know how they got to know about Mumbai Votes - maybe through chain e-mails. They came forward and decided to fund this with their personal funds. That has been quite an adequate model till now. As long as the funds come with no strings attached, and with a clear understanding that it is only going to be used for running the cost of Mumbai Votes. We want to continue with individuals who resonate with this idea and the activity.

We work with Janaagraha, AGNI, a very important group - Parliament Research Services, in Delhi, an individual/project in Bangalore, called Project Clean Up, and with Vivek Shangari and Karmayog. In addition to this we also work with academic institutions like Mumbai University and several colleges with journalism and management programmes.

Yes. We have developed some tools.

• Basically, an offline version of Mumbai Votes… We have developed this ‘Mumbai Voters Guide’, which we put out before the General Assembly elections. It is almost like a telephone directory of your candidates, with profiles of them - their political background, legislative records, transcripts of their video interviews, etc.
• We are also on the verge of developing education tools, which is basically to demystify the legislative bills that will be up for debate in parliament, and the basic principles of the constitution of India. These have a direct impact on our life, and we want to convert them into video content, which we would like to disseminate through viral networks like YouTube to make them meaningful instead of just abstract concepts.
• In the future, we want to have a mobile phone application, where you can ping the website for data on your elected representative.
• We are also trying to pursue a project with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Powai/Chennai – to do optical character recognition of regional language newspapers, so that instead of photographing the regional language newspapers the idea is to develop a tool that can scan it, and the software will automatically identify articles and classify them under various categories. Right now, it seems to be too daunting, even for the people at IIT.

No. They have heard of it, but I don’t think that there has been any official communication.

I do believe that the current obstacles are related to the archives of information of our media institutions - that certainly needs to be improved. Most respectable journalistic institutions have very interesting and interactive archives, but I know that there cannot be a law, that says, all newspapers must have excellent, searchable archives,.

Also, the whole fair use clause of the International Copyright Act needs to be upheld. There needs to be greater freedom to use newspaper articles for the purpose of research. There have been cases where you ask people to use their archive and they wouldn’t allow it. Before, we took a lot of content from a newspaper, then there was lot of resistance and they insisted that we pay a certain exorbitant fee for every news story we take even though we don’t intend to sell them, and just want to use them for research and to display them on our website. That can really be a great hindrance for a movement of this sort, because, nobody has that kind of budget.

Not replication, but there was this one website that came up called 'Maharashtra Votes' a few months ago, which also had the same color scheme as our website, and a very similar logo. It seems like it was a front for some political party - you can almost figure that out. They were trying to pass it off as unbiased information.

There has been a lot of interest from cities such as Delhi and Bangalore. There is a group in Bangalore called Smart Vote. They also look to provide information – just about candidates during elections. After the general assembly elections we actually met them in Bangalore and they were keen to adopt some of our practices in Mumbai Votes like incorporating the whole student and academic engagement model, having a reliable stream of volunteers and interns, etc. There also have been students from Delhi University, who want to build something like Delhi Votes.

Karmayog! - there is nothing like Karmyog in this entire city. It is an incredible portal that connects citizen energy with NGO vision. Any person in Mumbai can go beyond the narrow confines of a 9 to 5 life, and really contribute. They are also coming up with this "empower movement," where any citizen with a mobile phone can report on a civic issue, as they see it happen. It will build probably the most comprehensive database of civic complaints, which is a very essential thing, even for Mumbai Votes.

I would develop a tool - a scanner, where every piece of news information that comes to our doorstep everyday is automatically scanned, and the tool, in a very efficient and smart manner, uploads the information to Mumbai Votes - so that the mundane work of mining this information from the internet or hardcopy newspapers gets resolved. We can move to investing in the more challenging social science analysis that we really want to do.

I certainly would like to hire a lot of these students as interns, who get paid a decent stipend. I also want to develop a control center, or a space where a lot of our volunteers and researchers can use the Internet and IT resources. We can create something like a nerve center, a mini institute, where research work can happen in a consolidated manner.

We do not want to become a body, where only professionals work, because the essence of this movement is that we are all citizens who have empowered ourselves. 2010 and 2011 is to solidify the research and analysis mechanism for Mumbai Votes and to create a comprehensive protocol for the Promises Vs Performance analysis for MPs and MLAs - enhancing it from now on, and trying to build in these smart tools for doing our ground research - our basic research.