By Nabodita Roy
Kolkata : Director of Jarvis Technology and Strategy Consulting (one of the best political and policy consultant agency in India) enriched the audience about the growth of political consultancy in India, while speaking on the topic ‘Development & Political Communication Online’ on the 8th day of the MediaNext 2020. The writer of this article had also interacted with Mogra personally for an in-depth know-how..
MediaNext2020 is being organized by the Kolkata-based Adamas University in association with Sharda University, Birla Global University, DME, AIMEC, LOK Samvad Sansthan, exchange4media, ABP Education and IndiaReal. The MediaNext 2020 is being organized over 10 days from June 1, 2020, to June 10, 2020. Each day of the conclave focuses on one specialized domain of the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on that specific domain.
An engineer by profession, Sportsperson by heart, Diggaj Mogra started his journey as a political consultant in 2013 when he was assigned to follow Narendra Modi’s work, then CM of Gujrat. While interviewing him, he said, “I was reading about him a lot and I got interested in his work, so I joined the special team 2013 to follow him closely”. He is also the co-founder of polTactics Consulting, which was created to do some outreach campaigns and was part of PM Modi’s Lok Sabha election campaign in 2014. As the director of Jarvis Technology and Strategy Consulting, he was an integral part of PM Modi’s 2019 General Election Campaign as well. He was also the Chief Strategist behind ‘MahaVastradaan’ – A Guinness World Record-breaking Campaign Drive, where they tried to help the poor in fulfilling one of their basic needs i.e. clothing.
Political Campaigns have to adapt to Technology in this Covid-19 era
“I don’t think this COVID-19 will go away easily and we have to live with it. So political campaigns have to adapt to the current situation”, Mogra initiated the discussion by stating that. He also said that once everything gets normal we will again see all the rallies, door to door campaigns, big meetings, and other things. He talked more about the technology and the data aspect of things and everyone should adapt to it. “People like it or not, politics and technology are forever intervened in symbiotic dance”, said Mogra.
A range of Applications for political campaigns
Mogra did a campaign in the 2019 election called ‘Sangbaad Kendra’ where they used various aspects of technology to reach millions of people like Big data, Big data mining, Big data mapping, proper use of CRM, and call center communication.
According to him, every political party had multiple cells where they focus on technology and data separately. They use mobile application to communicate with the general public and also social media to target a large number of people. His company had started using chatbots as well where they can connect with so many people at once. He said, “I am confident that chatbots will grow in multifold.” He also talked about automated content generation where they use natural language processing to connect with a particular human being.
Mogra stressed upon the importance of fight against fake news for every political party. Many agencies use the method of structured content sharing to tackle fake news and many web apps are trying to filter this fake news.
“In the coming times five technologies will be used heavily in political campaigns”. Those are :
- Chatbots
- AI and Machine Learning
- AR & VR
- Granular Data
- Automated Content Generation
India is far away from using Digital Voting
On being asked about the digital voting in India, He replied, “Many countries are using it right now. But India is far away from using it because there are lots of issues with privacy and hacking and it is not a mature system to have”.
Data Security is Necessary
When asked about the Data security, He said, “We have faced many issues regarding the data because it could be stolen and it could fall in wrong hands. So we have to be very careful about storing the data in the right manner. Sometimes we have to look for the legitimacy of the data as well”.
Exclusive Comment
Political Consultancy is a Good Career Path
This writer asked about whether there is any competition in this field, Mogra said, “There’s no such competition in this field now, but there are other good agencies like Ipac, ABM, Infocrunch, and others. But everyone has their expertise but we are unique in a way where we use technologies and data, which no other agencies do as of now. And we are lucky that there’s not much competition in this domain now. So if you want to choose a career path, this domain could be a good career path for you”.
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