Online election campaigns: A cash-cow for IT firms

Bangalore: Technology companies in India seem to have overlooked a big fact that India is the largest populous democracy in the world, and thereby under estimated a big business opportunity - online election campaigns.

In India, there are around 800 political parties registered with the Election Commission of the country, including national, state and other parties. All these parties spend a huge amount during elections. It is estimated that during the Indian general elections of 2004, the total money spent in campaigning was approximately $2.6 billion, while the money spent for the primary and general campaigns of the U.S. presidential election in 2008 was $1.6 billion (as per reported by Federal Election Commission). For the coming Lok Sabha elections, the estimated expenditure is over $2 billion. But it may go up as it does during every election.

U.S. based ElectionMall Technologies, which provides tools and services to campaigns, is one of the IT firms that see a big fortune in Indian elections. The company founder Ravi Singh has set up its Indian subsidiary called eSolutions, with support from George Spix, a Microsoft Executive as an investor.

Singh is very optimistic about the e-democracy space in India. "If Indians can vote for an Indian Idol and express their political views in support or in opposition at any place, they can most certainly express it online too. The e-democracy space has huge potential for society but whether it can be a profitable business is another question," says Singh.

Social networking sites are already flush with messages promoting particular parties or candidates. Sumeet Anand, Founder, CEO of social networking startup I-nable Solutions says, "A good opportunity is there for strategic social media or marketing consulting, where service providers can help political parties reach out to the young voters through online campaigns and social networking platforms."

All the efforts on online media during election are meant to get the youth (a majority of them are online) of India out of their desk to cast their vote as they constitute around 50 percent of the voters. However, Pavan Krishnamurthy, Partner, Ojas Venture Partners, is a little skeptical about the space. He says, "Elections happen once in five years and building a scalable business on such a business is going to be tough. The other challenge is of reaching out to voters in non-metro regions." Krishnamurthy it would take at least 5-7 years before we can see any traction in e-democracy space.

Though this space mainly offers seasonal windfalls, there are elections - apart from general ones - to the state assemblies, municipal bodies, panchayats, excluding by-elections, contributing towards bridging the time gap between the procedural elections

On the democratic side, the technological initiatives by political parties augur well for Indian Democracy. The country had been witnessing rigged elections and booth capturing by extremist elements. Technology can offer solutions to these malignancies. The voting evolution has already in place with the introduction of electronic voting machine that helped avert ballot manipulations to a great extent.