Saket Gokhale said that the BJP has routinely hired Jarvis Consulting & ABM (Association of a Billion Minds) for their election campaigning.Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Saket Gokhale on Wednesday alleged that the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) is “illegally giving out government data to private companies for their election campaigning”.
Sharing on X (formerly Twitter) the screenshots of a Hindustan Times story from May 2019, the Rajya Sabha MP said that the BJP hired two consulting firms for their campaigning, which relied on data of beneficiaries of various government schemes.
“Yesterday, Union Min @HardeepSPuri claimed in response to TMC’s allegations that “data of union govt beneficiaries is protected’,” Gokhale wrote on X.
The Trinamool leader said that the BJP has routinely hired Jarvis Consulting & ABM (Association of a Billion Minds) for their election campaigning.
“These 2 companies target beneficiaries of govt schemes & use them for campaigning for BJP. How do Jarvis & ABM know where to find these beneficiaries considering Modi Govt claims that data of govt beneficiaries is confidential? It is clear that Modi Govt illegally shares crores of data points with pvt cos hired by BJP,” Gokhale added.
The TMC leader then urged the Election Commission to urgently look into this and “demand a written explanation from the Govt of India on how pvt cos hired by BJP are getting confidential data of beneficiaries”.
The BJP’s carefully crafted campaign in the 2019 elections targeted voters based on data compiled by a team of 400 information technology professionals, mapping its outreach through more than 160 control rooms and working closely with party workers, the HT story said.
The BJP chose two consulting firms— Jarvis Technology and Strategy Consulting Private Limited and Association of Billion Minds (ABM) — to target voters using data analytics. They reached out to beneficiaries of central welfare schemes such as Ujjwala, which offered free cooking gas connections to poor households, or Swachh Bharat Mission, under which toilets were built inside houses.
“We worked with data obtained by BJP party workers and primary members. The party workers reached out to the primary members who had joined the party after the missed call campaign in 2014. They did the beneficiary outreach together,” a Jarvis executive was quoted as saying in the HT report.
As part of the missed call campaign, volunteers would call those who gave a missed call, get their basic details, fix up an appointment and meet them personally to deliver an information kit on the Modi campaign.
“We had their specific address and areas and mobilised them to reach out to the nearest central scheme beneficiaries and collect their data through multiple events,” the Jarvis executive cited above said.
These campaigns were also used for collecting data on voters. “We collected a lot of data through this. Their data would then come up on our servers and we used it to contact them through various forms of communication like sending SMSs and interactive voice response system,” the Jarvis executive added.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) guidelines prohibited party workers from contacting beneficiaries directly.
“We could not directly contact beneficiaries till they opted for it and gave us a missed call. Parties used to buy data from telecom agencies and shoot an SMS. Mapping and filtering it from such a huge database was not done before,” the executive added.
BJP, through Jarvis, contacted about 240 million beneficiaries in a span of eight months.
“We knew booth-wise how many people, where our workers are etc. That micro-targeting with filtered data was the key,” the Jarvis executive said.
The party had data on recipients of the benefits of government programmes such as Mudra loans for small entrepreneurs and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana for housing finance, according to an ABM official quoted in the report.
“BJP is good at maintaining such data, on an average, they would have 15,000 people’s data per assembly segment. Beneficiary data would come from the central government only,” said the ABM official.