Parties can now vote on Infosys's co-founder Nandan Nilekani's campaign technology

BENGALURU: The technology backbone which Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani’s team built ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha election for his poll campaign is now available to parties and elected representatives across the political divide. FourthLion, the tech startup mentored by Nilekani, is offering the platform, VoteBank, to help political leaders manage governance issues and development priorities that have taken centre-stage post elections.

"Use of technology for election campaigns as well as constituency management is going to be very critical going forward," Nandan told ET. "In fact in our Book ‘Rebooting India’, Viral and I have predicted that next General Election will be a ‘mobile first’ election with over 500-million voters having smartphones," he added.

Politics is a domain scarcely touched by technology and analytics, said Naman Pugalia (28), CEO of FourthLion, and a protégée of Nilekani. "Politicians have a great amount of catching up to do as voters’ aspirations are growing exponentially while politicians’ abilities to respond is growing linearly," he said.

Two years ago, even as he fought elections, Nilekani guided the team to develop a technology-led constituency management system: the platform was designed to release a tracker number against each suggestion or complaint so that they will reach a closure.

The startup claims to work with leaders to craft their campaign plank, personalise messages, analyse electoral data, earn media, and monitor booth level activity. "Our platform will help candidates cut the campaigning costs significantly," Pugalia said.

The startup charges a fee for its value-added services. Of the four cofounders Pugalia, Shankar Maruwada and Viral Shah worked with Nilekani at the Unique Identity Authority of India. Another cofounder, Gaurav Goel, worked at McKinsey. Shah designed the LPG subsidy architecture at UIDAI, and coauthored Nilekani’s recent book. The team said they managed former Union Minister Veerappa Moily’s Lok Sabha election campaign in Chikkaballapur and former Maharashtra CM Prithviraj Chavan’s Assembly election campaign activities in Karad South. "In fact, Nandan’s is the only campaign in which we did not win," said Pugalia with a touch of sadness.

Harsha Moily, the entrepreneur-son of the Chikkaballapur MP, said the Fourth Lion, using a set of data, is currently guiding them on where they should be deploying the MP local area development funds more in preparation for the next Lok Sabha elections. He is also relying on technology to build the next line of political leadership. "We have automated the entire process of grievance redressal program," Moily added.