Durga Prasad, an 80-year-old farmer, was resting under the shade of a tree in front of his house when party workers arrived. Apps on their smartphones can instantly tell them who Prasad is, who he might vote for and why he should thank Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“You can pay Rs 2,000 in installments, right?” asked a local official from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to which Prasad agreed. He earns $72 a year through a farmer welfare program initiated and built by Mr. Modi.
“Do you have rations?” the officer then asked, even though he already knew the answer. He has made his point.
Such handouts are one of the most unique parts of Modi’s appeal to the masses. The country’s new airport, diplomatic prestige and booming stock market may look like Mr Modi’s calling cards, but for the 95 per cent of Indians who earn too little to pay income tax, small infusions of cash and household goods are more important. important. Modi’s party is organizing to take advantage of these opportunities in national elections due early next month.
India has a wide range of welfare schemes. Under the largest provision, 821 million Indians are entitled to free 5-kilogram (11-pound) bags of rice or wheat each month. The government began distributing food early in the pandemic to prevent hunger and has since invested $142 billion in the program. In January, Modi’s face started appearing on the sacks.
Another Prime Minister-branded program has helped people build 15 million homes since 2015, at a cost of $3 billion a year; home renovations and additions are also included. The government is also shouldering the cost of millions of toilets and is working to provide piped drinking water to every home.
The foundation for this expanded welfare system was laid soon after Modi became prime minister in 2014. certification plan.
These accounts provide the country with valuable information about the financial lives of its poorest citizens. They also open the way for “direct welfare transfers” that bypass the sometimes corrupt local officials who once distributed benefits and appear to come from Modi himself.
These transfers increased to $76 billion last fiscal year. But Mr Modi’s budget has not become profligate. This is partly because government spending on education and health care—long-term investments—has shrunk as a share of the economy as branded welfare programs have proliferated. Spending on job-guaranteed programs linked to Modi’s opponents also fell.
Whatever the motivation behind it, Mr Modi’s priority on tangible food and household benefits has eased Indians’ pain as the economy slowed before the pandemic, collapsed in its first year and then returned to unevenness. The Hindu nationalist government distributes aid equally to all religious groups, even if it does not receive many votes from some of them.
These handouts are perhaps most powerful when Modi claims to have improved the lives of fellow Indians, hundreds of millions of whom still desperately need reliable jobs and decent wages.
Vinod Misra, a local BJP official who recently visited Prasad in Uttar Pradesh’s Amethi district, explained that in a poor area where people once died of hunger, “our party Special efforts are being made to develop projects that benefit everyone.
“All we have to do is go and tell the family, ‘Brother, who made this roof you got?’” Mr. Mishra said.
Pradeep Gupta, director of pollster Axis My India, said that in a country where 80% of the population is either rural or poor, people are very serious about exchanging their votes for something. thing. If politicians deliver on their promises, “the people will elect you again and again,” Gupta said. Everything else is “marketing.”
The BJP’s follow-up to voters is the culmination of a massive effort that leverages its ideologically committed core membership, funding, national organization and increasingly sophisticated data management.
In the temple town of Pushkar in the Hindi “cow belt” west of the BJP stronghold of Amethi, another local party worker explained the advantages of an app called Saral. With a few swipes and clicks, the worker, Shakti Singh Rathore, shared a bird’s-eye view of his neighbourhood, which he intended to command for Mr Modi.
There are 241 “polling stations” or polling stations in the Pushkar constituency, each with its own map boundaries. Mr. Rathore opened a message from a stall he supervised. He is targeting not only voters but also beneficiaries, or “labharthis” – an important new term in ground campaigns.
“The names of the Labatis are listed here,” Mr. Rathore said. One man he mentioned received a cooking gas cylinder – “Here’s his address, postcode and phone number.” Another received cash from the Farmers Welfare Scheme.
“All the data is here,” Mr. Rathore said.
Anyone can download Saral through the Apple or Google Play stores to get campaign updates, but only enlisted BJP workers can explore its database. The party’s national leadership said they use Saral to connect more than 6 million workers. They can all retrieve and upload information about voters and beneficiaries.
Voters don’t seem bothered, or at least not surprised, that political workers go door-to-door spreading so many messages about their relationship with their national government.
Misra said he didn’t know exactly how all the personal information got into the app. Other local staff said they believed the data was provided by the government itself, given its accuracy. Amit Malviya, the BJP’s head of information and technology, said at a launch meeting in December that the party had manually collected 30 terabytes of data in the past 10 elections.
Salar also does a lot of other things that are helpful to the team’s ground game. It tracks workers’ outreach and measures differences among them based on their performance, effectively “gamifying” the hard work of canvassing.
It also gives workers a chance to help constituents get benefits smoothly, bridging the gap between partisan politics and government work.
Modi himself told television crews this month that he had told party workers to collect information from voters who had not received benefits and “assured them – and this is Modi’s guarantee – that they will be there in my third term.” get it.
Ajay Singh Gaur, a PPP worker who accompanied Misra to near Amethi, found himself in an argument with farmer Dinesh Maurya There was a long exchange, with the latter complaining that a faulty power line had fallen on his wheat field.
“My entire crop was burned and I didn’t get a single coin in compensation,” Mr Moria said.
Mr Gower assured Mr Moriah that he would repay the money the country owed him. “I have spoken to the officials responsible for the power station,” he said. “I’ll get it done.”
Mujib Mashar Contributed reporting.
