How Data Analytics Team Failed to Make Winning Decisions for Congress

Recently concluded 17^th Lok Sabha election in India delivered a surprise wining to BJP-led NDA again, following consecutive 2014 Lok Sabha election. Conversely, it put a cumulative effect of bad data collection by Congress' data analytics team that led a humiliating defeat.

The India's grand old party botched to establish a precise ear-to-ground sense, and not being able to accurately gauge the Modi 2.0 wave. The reasons behind this failure were the Congress' data analytics team, Project Shakti, had many fundamental faults such as manufactured data and wrong feedback to decision-makers, reports suggest.

As a statement by Praveen Chakravarty, a Wharton-educated investment banker and the head of the Congress data department since its inception in February 2018, didn't provide any specific clue about the grand old party's data department's failure, the party insiders have stressed the key flaws in Project Shakti, including collection of bad data, manufactured data, people working in silos and wrong feedback to decision makers in the party.

Project Shakti Overview

As a data analytics team, Project Shakti was formed with the core objective of transforming a slack volunteer-based party to a cadre-based organization, ahead of the general elections. The formula to achieve this objective was to link party workers' voter IDs to their mobile numbers and addresses through an SMS.

The platform allows Rahul Gandhi to talk to a booth-level worker, who would be energized by such open communication. This, in turn, would energise the Congress, as party workers noted.

The Reason Behind Fiasco

In May last year, the project was pilot Ahead of 2018 Karnataka assembly polls and for the party to have 8-10 member per booth. So, for reckoning this, Congress needed 4-5 lakh members for the 55,000 booths, including Karnataka. But this created a lot of pressure on party workers, which results in fake data collection. According to a party insider, "30-40 percent of data had random names and phone numbers."

And the same process echoed across the nation ahead of the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. Project Shakti Insiders mentioned the instance of Telangana, where a Congress member outsourced a call centre to this job while posing as an Election Commission official. He went door-to-door, took people's voter IDs and phone numbers and sent SMSes. With this way, he enrolled 12,000-15,000 members, and the end result was fake data of anywhere between 50 to 70 percent.

The other major flaw that report noted was no oversight on Project Shakti, despite suggestions from party biggies, including Jairam Ramesh. And this was because, Chakravarty was not approaching with the data, not even with Divya Spandana-headed the party's social media team.

By relying on this data collected, the congress' data analytics team gauge the mood of the nation, and made policy decisions that led the party towards failure. Also, the party workers never gave a genuine feedback to senior leaders. According to the report, a member called it an "echo chamber", where workers told leaders "what they wanted to hear".

One of the leading factors is also humiliated the party that some Congress members have even alleged that the decision on whether or not forge an alliance was based on the data provided by Shakti, even though the methodology of conducting the surveys and how the inference was drawn was never shared.