Diggaj Mogra, the Director of Jarvis Technology and Strategy Consulting (one of the best political and policy consultant agencies in India) spoke about the growth of political consultancy in India. An engineer by profession and a sportsperson by heart, Diggaj Mogra started his journey as a political consultant in 2013 when he was assigned to follow Narendra Modi’s work, the then Chief Minister of Gujrat. Mogra 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”.

Mogra is also the Co-founder of polTactics Consulting, which was created to do some outreach campaigns and was part of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra 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, which helped the poor in fulfilling one of the basic needs of clothing.

 

Political Campaigns Have to Adapt to Technology in This Covid-19 Era

“I don’t think 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 shall 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 said that everyone should adapt to it. “Like it or not, politics and technology are forever intertwined in a 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 the various aspects of technology to reach millions of people like big data, big data mining, big data mapping, proper use of CRM and call-centre communication.

According to him, every political party has multiple cells where they focus on technology and data separately. They use mobile applications 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 many people at once. He said, “I am confident that chatbots will grow 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 the 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 and VR.

• Granular Data.

• Automated Content Generation.

 

India Is Far Away from Using Digital Voting

Speaking about 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

Touching on the point of data security, he said, “We have faced many issues regarding 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.”

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Political Consultancy is a Good Career Path

Talking 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 I-PAC, ABM, InfoCrunch and others. But everyone has their expertise. 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”.

 

The author, Nabodita Roy is associated with Adamas University Media School.