BackOpinion | Election hyperbole: Sifting the wheat from the chaff
Political parties make big promises during election. Voters should see data to decide which ones were kept
PremiumAt the end of every year, a quiet burial takes place without any visible grieving or audible mourning, or a dead body. What dies is a technology which has been hyped up to overtake the world, change lives or revolutionise the world. Often trumpeted as the next best thing, many technologies quietly pass into the night or unobtrusively fall by the wayside. A funeral does take place, but mostly in the specialist magazines or websites devoted to technology. Technologies now compete with dead brands for space in the graveyard of the redundant and defunct—remember brands like Dalda, Murphy’s radio, Chiclets chewing gum, aerated drink Campa Cola or Binaca toothpaste?
It’s that time of the year when some political brands will finally experience public disaffection, get rejected by target audiences and perhaps even fade into the twilight of political oblivion. Like hoopla in technology, it’s also the high season for hype in politics. It’s a bit facetious to compare elections and their results with markets-based outcomes; elections are the ultimate test of democracy and the citizen’s act of casting one single vote subsumes multiple layers of political ideologies and thought processes. But, importantly, it is also a credible hype-buster.
Gartner, a research and advisory firm, has developed a methodology called Gartner Hype Cycles, which is intended to help companies separate viable technologies from hype, especially in the face of audacious promises made by new technologies. Many companies continuously evaluate emerging technologies to figure out their strategic utility and the competitive edge they can provide. According to the Gartner website, “Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. Gartner Hype Cycle methodology gives you a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment…"
In the end, as the literature indicates, the Hype Cycles are intended to help futurists and strategists distinguish between the commercial value of a technology and the hype surrounding it. Seen differently, it helps companies minimise the risks of investing in specious technology. For example, in its latest report (titled Most Hyped Trends for 2019), Gartner sees artificial intelligence, blockchain and intelligent things as technologies that will continue to get attention and investment during 2019. But Gartner does add that despite the gigantic hype surrounding AI, companies must know where to focus to tap into the technology’s transformative potential. Likewise, blockchain is not a revolutionary technology but a definite step change in data security and transparency.
Suffice it to say that the cemetery of past hyped (and, subsequently, failed) technologies is today looking rather over-crowded. This columnist was once the proud owner of a Palm Pilot personal digital assistant (PDA), which now lies obsolete and unused. The company that manufactured Palm Pilots, failed to take PDAs to the next level; after being passed around a few hopeful acquirers, the product had to be taken off life support and quietly buried. Remember Iridium satellite phones? Promised as a game-changer, Iridium was to provide global telephony infrastructure through a network of over 60 satellites. In the end, the $7-billion spectacular flame-out also singed some Indian institutions, including IL&FS Venture Fund, all of whom invested in the project at the behest of the currently beleaguered Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd. The project failed to gauge market expectations, technological developments and, most importantly, customer needs.
Elections provide a quinquennial test-bed—once every five years, politicians making claims they can’t live up to or promises that sound too outlandish get sorted out. With election campaign pitch reaching absurd levels, it might be instructive to weigh some of the achievements which have been hyped up by this government.
First off the bat must be two policy initiatives—the insolvency and bankruptcy code and the goods and services tax-- which can do a lot of good but are yet to deliver any substantial results. The insolvency and bankruptcy code has the potential to change the lender-borrower dynamic in India which has traditionally been skewed in favour of the large corporate, given the industry-politician-bureaucrat nexus. A supporting legal framework and policy structure gave hope that banks would soon be able to recover their dues, which would then enable them to lend to businesses again. On its part, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) shortlisted 24 cases with the highest amount of loans outstanding for resolution. But the outcome has been rather underwhelming; instead the country witnessed a rather public spat between the government and RBI, with the governor resigning and the Supreme Court upbraiding the central bank for exceeding its jurisdiction.
The promises that have generated a great deal of hullabaloo are the universal basic income variants proposed by both the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress: Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana and Nyuntam Aay Yojana, respectively. On 23 May, it will become apparent which of the promises has found wider acceptance and which one has been discarded as just hyperbole.
Rajrishi Singhal is consulting editor of Mint.
His Twitter handle is @rajrishisinghal
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