Politics 101 finds takers with youth leaders, doctors and autorickshaw drivers signing up

Not much disturbs him when he is doing homework.
Not even Rahul Gandhi, says Congress man B V Naidu. Last week, his colleagues asked him to step out of his house and atleast ‘wave’ to the party scion but Naidu remained in front of his computer, mapping Vasanth Nagar ward’s roads, especially the badly pockmarked ones.
“I have contested BBMP elections twice from here and have 20 years of political experience.But I didn’t know how many kilometres of road is there in my ward,” says Naidu, a 37-year-old real estate businessman. Now he also knows that around 60% of the 58kmstretch is riddled with potholes. And that was his assignment for this week.
Politicians are usually not associated with lectures and lesson plans but a few aspiring leaders from the city have gone back to the classroom in the last two years. The third batch of B.Pac Civic Leadership Incubation Programme (B.Clip), run by the citizens’ group with Takshashila Institution, has around 40 participants who aim to understand the system and maybe, make a mark in electoral politics.
“I am in public life and it will help me serve Bangalore better if I am informed and knowledgeable,” says R Lingaraju, who was at the B.Clip class on ‘Economic Reasoning’ on Friday. He hopes to get a BJP ticket to BBMP elections sometime soon and listened earnest ly when Takshashila founder Nitin Pai explained that good politics comes with sound economic understanding.
“If running a company needs some form of management knowledge and training, running a city of 9 million people needs a lot more,” says Pavan Srinath, head of policy at Takshashila. With many political aspirants seeming to think so, there has been no shortage of students. “We have trained nearly 80 students since 2013.
Around 20 of them contested elections and the current cor poration council has one B.Clip trained participant,” says Sharath SR of B.Pac. The current batch consists of a diverse set of people: from doctors, engineers, business people, and youth leaders to homemakers and autorickshaw drivers.
Political parties have been talking about training its workers for a while now. “That is partly because the nature of governance and policy has changed. Complexity of governance has gone up,” says Congress MP and former IIM-B professor Rajeev Gowda, who used to run one such course three years ago. Also, instead of learned lawyers, politics seem to attract people with a business background these days. “Often they are thrust into a domain about which they have no idea,” he says.
Training sessions help leaders reduce their dependence on bureaucrats to run the show, and also improve their image.
With increasing media coverage and external agencies like Praja routinely rating MLAs, image has to be carefully nurtured. “Unless you are a real estate racketeer who doesn’t care at all, most leaders want to make sure that people respect you and acknowledge your work,” says Gowda.
But it isn’t easy running such courses. Gowda says he had to struggle to raise money to organise guest lectures, field trips and offer scholarships to women leaders who attended the India-Women in Leadership course held at IIM-B. Nitin Pai says his team had to create the curriculum from scratch as there are no text books or study material. “Similarly, we had to innovate a lot in how we teach concepts in economic reasoning, political philosophy and technology,” he says.
At his economic reasoning class, Pai held up a wrist watch to effectively differentiate between concepts like price, cost and opportunity cost. This was then used to make the participants think about how they can rationally approach a routine corporation fund allocation for infrastructure projects. Sessions like these also try to help leaders with time management and cost-effective publicity tips.
But the biggest hurdle remains the thinking that nothing can be done to salvage the quality of leadership, says Pai.
“People still think politics is all about cynically manipulating money, caste and vested interests to win seats. Because this is true to a large extent, people don't invest in training leaders.
No wonder we get the same outcomes election after election,” he says.