BackDaksh | What’s your MLA’s score?
An organisation that grades the performance of political leaders in Karnataka
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In March, when Kannada newspaper Vijay Karnataka ran a six-week campaign publishing performance scorecards for candidates along with detailed electoral cartographs in the run up to the assembly elections, the response was overwhelming. “Most newspapers see a swell in readership and circulation before elections, but we saw a more prominent swell than expected," says Sugata Raju, editor-in-chief of the newspaper that has, according to him, a readership of 3.4 million across the state. Raju received thousands of reader emails and letters from across the state. “It was an important collaboration between the extensive reporter network of Vijay Karnataka with a detailed and very unique survey conducted by (the not-for-profit) Daksh," he says.
“Politics, we realized, is a game of perceptions and we needed to understand how the voter perceived his elected candidate and make that information available for people to make their next electoral decision," says Harish Narasappa, co-founder of Bangalore-based Daksh, founded in 2006 by a group of six like-minded people—a lawyer, an academic, an educator and three information technology (IT) professionals. Of these, Narasappa and Kishore Mandyam are the most active.
“At the outset, we all knew there was something wrong with the way we were being governed, but the question was what could we do to help," says Narasappa, a corporate lawyer who moved to India in 2002 after working in London for four years. At the time the air in Bangalore was rife with talk of citizen participation. “And we thought, look, what else do you want the citizen to do? I vote every election and vote for the best candidate possible. If you look at the Karnataka elections, we keep rejecting the old government. Who can we ask as to why this is happening?" says Narasappa.
The team found a void in the understanding of what it is that candidates do between two elections. “There are some star leaders who are always in the news and mostly for the wrong reasons, what are the rest doing?" they asked. They realized that the best answer could be found by asking the voter how his leader fared.
Daksh’s survey sheets ask the voter to rate the candidate on overall performance and also pick three-four issues like infrastructure, education, health and accessibility and rate them on a scale of 1-10. “The citizen gets to choose what issues are important to him and then rate his leader based on that," says Mandyam, adding the aim was to shift the focus of electoral surveys from predictions to issues.
“We are not claiming to be psephologists and don’t intend to predict the result of any elections. We are in the business to raise the level of the debate," says Mandyam, an IT professional. Hiring professional surveyors, they realized, would be too expensive for an organization that is mostly funded by its team and their friends.
“So we came up with what we call a pencil solution," say Mandyam. They took over three months to design and plan surveys that were then conducted by a network of teachers and social workers across Karnataka over three weekends. “The brief is to cover different religions and different castes. They shouldn’t talk only to the landed or only to the literate or only to men," says Narasappa. With a sample size of 13,000 people across 224 state constituencies (CSDS, or the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, has a sample size of 24,000 people across 540 parliamentary constituencies), the results have even shown a near accurate distribution of caste and religion. Part of Daksh’s survey also questions if a candidate uses caste to ask for votes and how important the caste factor is to the voter.
“Sometimes the guy who has got the best score would have gone to jail several times and we wondered if this was the way. But then we realized it’s not about our perception. People want responsive leaders and a clean, useless guy is not somebody who is preferred," says Narasappa, adding that Daskh is ideologically neutral and doesn’t have an opinion on who wins.
The organization, however, does share data with the Bangalore Political Action Committee (B.PAC) that identifies and promotes strong candidates. Led by biotechnology firm Biocon’s chairperson and managing director Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Manipal Global Education Services chairperson T.V. Mohandas Pai, B.PAC uses data from Daksh’s research and checks the integrity of candidates before publicly endorsing them.
In addition to reader response, the scorecards found an audience in the candidates who were being rated. Those who got high scores called in asking for copies of the data, others asked for details of the poor scores of their opponents. “The politician is a typical animal who takes reports in a local language newspaper very seriously because that’s his vote bank," says Raju.
The organization is now considering doing mid-term surveys to get a better grasp of the issues the voters worry about.
In a separate project, Daksh is conducting a Legislation Drafting Challenge for college students; the students will be asked to identify obstacles to good governance and draft policies they would like to see in effect. “How bills and policies are drafted and implemented is another major governance issue," says Narasappa, who also takes up governance-related PILs (public interest litigations) in his capacity as a lawyer.
Daksh plans to expand operations to at least 10 other states for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections either by creating survey teams themselves or by sharing their survey methods with other organizations.
10,000 can help them to
• Collect information regarding the performance of an MLA.
• Obtain people’s perceptions on issues that are important to them in one constituency.
• Collate a scorecard for one constituency.
If you volunteer, you will
• Help identify people’s expectations from their elected representatives.
• Find innovative ways to measure the performance of MPs/MLAs.
Recent donors
• ADR
• Accountability Initiative
• Namma Bengaluru Foundation
To contact Daksh, visit www.dakshindia.org
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