politics – Page 6 – Pertinent Observations

Analysing the BBMP Elections

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) went to polls on Saturday, and votes were counted today. The BJP has retained its majority in the house, winning 100 out of 198 available seats. While this is a downer compared to the 113 seats they had won in the previous elections in 2010, the fact that they have won despite being in opposition in the state is a significant achievement.

Based on data put out by Citizen Matters, here is some rudimentary analysis. The first is a choropleth of where each party has performed. Note that this is likely to be misleading since constituencies with large areas are over-represented, but this can give you a good picture.

blrelec — Red: BJP Green: Congress Cyan: JD(S) Blue: Independents Black: Others

Notice that there are a few “bands” where the BJP has performed really well. There is the south-western part of the city that it has literally swept, and it has done well in the south-eastern and northern suburbs, too. And the party hasn’t done too well in the north-west, the traditional “cantonment” area.

We can get a better picture of this by looking at the choropleths by assembly constituency. These shapes might be familiar to regular readers of the blog since I’d done one post on gerrymandering.

This tells you where each party has done well. As was evident from the first figure, the BJP has done rather well in Basavanagudi, Jayanagar and Padmanabhanagar in “traditional South Bangalore” and blanked out in Pulakeshi Nagar in the cantonment. In fact, if you try to correlate these results with that of the last Assembly elections, the correlation is rather strong. Most constituencies have gone the way of the assembly segments they are part of.

Then there is the issue of reservation – there were a lot of murmurs that the Congress party which is in power in the state changed the reservations to suit itself. Yet, there are a few interesting factoids that indicate that the new set of reservations were rather logical.

The next two graphs show the distribution of SC and ST populations respectively as a function of the reservations of the constituencies (population data from http://openbangalore.org).

Notice that the constituencies reserved for SCs and STs are among those that have the highest SC and ST populations respectively. The trick in gerrymandering was in terms of distributions between general and OBC constituencies, and among women.

I could put the performance of different parties by reservation categories, and on whether the reservation of a constituency has changed has any effect on results, but (un)fortunately, there aren’t any trends, and consequently there is little information content. Hence I won’t bother putting them in.

Nevertheless, these have been extremely interesting elections. All the postponement, all the drama and court case, and finally the underdog (based on previous trends) winning. Yet, given the structure of the corporation, there is little hope that much good will come of the city in the coming years. And there is nothing in the election results that can alter this.

One Rank One Pension – some thoughts

There has been a lot of debate of late on whether veterans should be moved to a “one rank one pension” system. I won’t bother explaining the whole deal here, I’ll let you read this brilliant post by Ajay Shah about the numbers behind the move. Now that the quant has been outsourced, I can put forth my “qualitative” arguments.

I’m not a fan of this One Rank One Pension (OROP) move. I’m not against paying our soldiers, or veterans, well – I think it must definitely pay above market rates for the skills required for the job. Yet, I think OROP is a “one delta” solution to the problem (previous post here about government’s one delta thinking on agriculture), and can lead to massive unfunded liabilities.

The problem with any kind of pension scheme is that you create liabilities today that need to be funded later on. And at a later date these liabilities might become unserviceable. From this perspective, it is important to try and fund any future liabilities today, or at least have a handle on the precise magnitude of liabilities required. OROP, being “inflation indexed” (that’s Ajay Shah’s nice model to look at it), doesn’t allow for proper budgeting and long-term planning.

It is precisely due to this budgeting issue that the government moved most of its incoming employees to the New Pension Scheme (NPS) in 2004. NPS, unlike previous pension schemes, is a “defined contribution” scheme, where your pension is paid out of a corpus you create by your own saving. From an accounting perspective, it moves liabilities from tomorrow (pensions) to today (higher salary to fund the contributions), and is an excellent move. And there is no reason for it not to apply to the armed forces.

Most of the arguments being made in favour of OROP are emotional (“how can you deny our veterans money” etc.), and not well backed up by logical or economic reasoning. One of those is that lower-level military persons retire when they are 35, and hence need a “one rank one pension” (which I absolutely fail to understand). While I understand that the rigours of the role imply early retirement, I don’t see why defined contribution doesn’t solve the problem. It will have to be matched with higher salaries (to fund the contribution required for a long lifetime of retirement), but that implies liabilities are funded today, which is superior to pushing liabilities under the carpet for future generations.

The thing with NPS is that it cannot be pushed retrospectively, and hence can apply at best to all forthcoming hires. We still need a solution for the existing employees and veterans, who are already on a defined benefit scheme. Yet, the important thing to consider is that the beneficiaries should be divided into three categories – current veterans, current servicemen and future servicemen, and we should find separate solutions for the three.

It might be argued that without defined benefit pensions, it might be hard to attract talent for a high-risk job like the military, and that is why we might need OROP. This is where the “derivative thinking” comes in. The thing about a job in the military is that there is a higher-than-civilian risk of losing life or limb. The solution to that is not blanket higher compensation – it is risk management.

What we need is generous death and disability insurance for our military, and this too should be purchased by the military from a professional Life Insurance firm. A generous insurance package can help mitigate the risks to life borne by military personnel, and should be sufficient to attract necessary talent. The purchase of such policies from professional insurers is important, for you don’t want the military to be doing an actuary’s job. More importantly, such a purchase will push liabilities to today rather than to tomorrow, and the last thing an army will want during the time of war is increased expenses on account of insurance.

The current debate about OROP has opened the door for a complete overhaul of military compensation. The government should jump at this, rather than simply get bullied by veterans’ groups. As Nitin Pai argues in this editorial in the Business Standard, compensation is an economic decision and should be made based on economic (and financial) reasoning, not based on emotion.

Means, medians and power laws

Following the disbursement of Rs. 10 lakh by the Andhra Pradesh government for the family of each victim killed in the stampede on the Godavari last week, we did a small exercise to put a value on the life of an average Indian.

The exercise itself is rather simple – you divide India’s GDP by its population to get the average productivity (this comes out to Rs. 1 lakh). The average Indian is now 29 and expected to live to 66 (another 37 years). Assume a nominal GDP growth rate of 12%, annual population increase of 2% and a cost of capital of 8% (long term bond yield) and you value the average Indian life at 52 lakhs.

People thought that the amount the AP government disbursed itself was on the higher side, yet we have come up with a higher number. The question is if our calculation is accurate.

We came up with the Rs. 1 lakh per head figure by taking the arithmetic mean of the productivity of all Indians. The question is if that is the right estimate.

Now, it is a well established fact that income and wealth follow a power law distribution. In fact, Vilfredo Pareto came up with his “Pareto distribution” (the “80-20 rule” as some people term it) precisely to describe the distribution of wealth. In other words, some people earn (let’s stick to income here) amounts that are several orders of magnitude higher than what the average earns.

A couple of years someone did an analysis (I don’t know where they got the data) and concluded that a household earning Rs. 12 lakh a year is in the “top 1%” of the Indian population by income. Yet, if you talk to a family earning Rs. 12 lakh per year, they will most definitely describe themselves as “middle class”.

The reason for this description is that though these people earn a fair amount, among people who earn more than them there are people who earn a lot more.

Coming back, if income follows a power law distribution, are we still correct in using the mean income to calculate the value of a life? It depends on how we frame the question. If we ask “what is the average value of an Indian life” we need to use mean. If we ask “what is the value of an average Indian life” we use median.

And for the purpose of awarding compensation after a tragedy, the compensation amount should be based on the value of the average Indian life. Since incomes follow a Power Law distribution, so does the value of lives, and it is not hard to see that average of a power law can be skewed by numbers in one extreme.

For that reason, a more “true” average is one that is more representative of the population, and there is no better metric for this than the median (other alternatives are “mean after knocking off top X%” types, and they are arbitrary). In other words, compensation needs to be paid based on the “value of the average life”.

The problem with median income is that it is tricky to calculate, unlike the mean which is straightforward. No good estimates of the median exist, for we need to rely on surveys for this. Yet, if we look around with a cursory google search, the numbers that are thrown up are in the Rs. 30000 to Rs. 50000 range (and these are numbers from different time periods in the past). Bringing forward older numbers, we can assume that the median per capita income is about Rs. 50000, or half the mean per capita income.

Considering that the average Indian earns Rs. 50000 per year, how do we value his life? There are various ways to do this. The first is to do a discounted cash flow of all future earnings. Assuming nominal GDP growth of about 12% per year, population growth 2% per year and long-term bond yield of 8%, and that the average Indian has another 37 years to live (66 – 29), we value the life at Rs. 26 lakh.

The other way to value the life is based on “comparables”. The Nifty (India’s premier stock index) has a Price to Earnings ratio of about 24. We could apply that on the Indian life, and that values the average life at Rs. 12 lakh.

Then, there are insurance guidelines. It is normally assumed that one should insure oneself up to about 7 times one’s annual income. And that means we should insure the average Indian at Rs. 3.5 lakh (the Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana provides insurance of Rs. 2 lakhs).

When I did a course on valuations a decade ago, the first thing the professor taught us was that “valuation is always wrong”. Based on the numbers above, you can decide for yourself if the Rs. 10 lakh amount offered by the AP government is appropriate.

Unions and competition

I completely fail to see why workers’ unions are against competition in the sector. The latest round in this comes from the National Federation for Indian Railwaymen (NFIR), which represents most of the workers in the Indian Railways, which has slammed the Bibek Debroy report on railway restructuring claiming that the report seeks to bring in privatisation into the sector.

Business Standard reports (emphasis mine),

While Debroy has sought to define liberalisation separately from privatisation in the report, he has also said the entry of private players into the system is already provided by extant policy. Trade unions fear any effort at bringing in private players into railway operations would jeopardise the workers’ jobs and negatively impact railways’ financial health

That private players coming in to railway operations could jeopardise jobs simply defies logic. Currently, the sector has a monopoly employer, namely Indian Railways, and this limits the bargaining power of any worker. With the coming of more (private) players, the demand for skilled workmen is only going to increase, and any new players would be much better off recruiting existing employees of the railways who are experienced in this business than recruiting from elsewhere.

So the coming of private players can only be a good thing from the point of view of workers.

However, what is good for the workers is not necessarily good for workers’ unions. The NFIR is a powerful union, representing 80% of the Railways’ 1.3 million employees (source: Business Standard report quoted above), or about a million employees. With the coming of private players, this number is surely going to go down (thanks to workers leaving, etc.) and this surely cannot be good news for the unions.

In other words, what is good for workers is not necessarily good for unions, and vice versa. And it is important to take this into account while making policy. In popular discourse, workers’ welfare and workers’ unions’ welfare get conflated, leading to policies that are pro unions but (they have higher bargaining powers) but not necessarily pro workers.

Recognition of this distinction can lead to much superior public policy.

How to improve regulation of utilities – comparing Delhi and DC

The Business Standard reports that the Delhi government has rejected the license applications of Uber, Ola and TaxiForSure. The snippet doesn’t say much more.

Contrast this with Washington D.C. which has passed a law that Uber has hailed as “model”. So what gives between the two capitals?

The answer is simple – it is the privileges accorded to the politicians. As a result of colonial hangover, Indian politicians have been mollycoddled with all kinds of perks such as houses in prime localities, chauffeured cars and the like. Thanks to such perks, bureaucrats are cut off from the market in general, and thus fail to understand any market failures.

The solution is simple in theory but hard to implement – basically cut the perks for government officers and instead compensate them further in cash, with the market value of the facilities that are now being provided for them. Clever structuring can make this cash-neutral. On the one hand, the bureaucrat now has a choice with respect to the kind of facilities he requires, leading to a more efficient allocation of resources.

More importantly, the bureaucrat is now part of the broader market, and thus exposed to the same market failures that plague the common man. If the transport commissioner of Delhi had to catch an auto rickshaw to get to work every day, we might have seen a completely different response in the Uber case.

Splitting BBMP and gerrymandering ToK

Kannada organisations have argued against splitting of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), the civic agency that is supposed to govern Bangalore, arguing that a three-way-split of the municipal corporation, as has been proposed, will lead to “non-Kannadiga mayors” for some of the newly created corporations, and hence this is an “anti-Kannada” move. In a funny twist, the Chief Minister himself has had to make a statement that the split won’t lead to “Telugu and Tamil mayors”.

A couple of months back, Thejaswi Udupa had written this tongue-in-cheek post on the geopolitics of Bangalore, for April Fool’s Day on Takshashila’s Logos blog. The Business Standard picked it up and published it as an Op-Ed the next day. The reason the piece matters is that it introduces the larger public to the wonderful phrase ToK. Quoting,

The largest of disputed territories in Bangalore is that of ToK. Tamil occupied Karnataka. These are large swathes of interconnected parcels of land in the South-Eastern quadrant of Bangalore. ToK’s existence is mostly under the radar, and people notice it only when the census figures come in once a decade with its linguistic break-ups, and suddenly people realise that nearly 25% of Bangalore’s population is Tamil. However, there are many who believe that ToK stands for Telugu owned Karnataka, as most of the land here is owned by Telugu landlords.

So basically the concern of the Kannada organisations is that when Bangalore is split ToK (however you may define it) will become an independent city. While some people might consider it a good thing in a “ok those buggers are not in our city any more” sort of way, these organisations will see this as a loss of territory, and consequently as a loss of power. So this is a genuine problem.

While this might be a genuine problem, the fact is that there is a “genuine” solution to this problem. We had seen last month about how Bangalore city is so badly gerrymandered in terms of splitting its assembly constituencies. For example, my constituency (Padmanabhanagar) looks like a dancing hen. To refresh your memory, this is what Bangalore’s assembly constituencies look like:

So if assembly constituencies are so badly gerrymandered, what prevents us from gerrymandering the municipal corporations? And there is further precedence to this – there are primarily three Parliamentary constituencies in Bangalore, and it is not hard to argue that they have been gerrymandered in a similar manner.

It all finally comes down to the mechanics of how we split the city. If the city is cut into three by drawing North-South lines (creating “Bangalore East”, “Bangalore West” and “Bangalore”), we have a problem, since the Bangalore East thus created will largely coincide with ToK, and we might end up with non-Kannadiga mayors there, as the Kannada organisations fear.

However, considering that Bangalore is being split for purely administrative efficiencies, and for no real cultural reasons, there is no reason we need to split the city in that way. All we need to do is to draw the lines in an East-West fashion, as we have done with our Parliamentary constituencies, giving us a “Bangalore North”, “Bangalore Central” and “Bangalore South”. A split like this, well done and well gerrymandered, will ensure that ToK is split evenly into the three new corporations, and all will remain under the control of the Kannadigas.

So the Kannada organisations don’t need to fear the split. Solution exists. Only thing they need to fear is the way the split is implemented. And with precedence (parliamentary gerrymandering) on their side, they really have nothing to fear!

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Varun Shenoy for the discussions leading up to this post

Agile programming and Parliamentary procedures

Supposedly the latest (ok not that latest – it’s been around for a decade) thing in software engineering is this thing called “Agile programming“. It’s basically about breaking away from the old “waterfall model” (which we had learnt in a software engineering course back in 2003), and to a more iterative model with quick releases, updates, etc.

I’ve never worked as a software engineer, but it seems to me that Agile programming is the way to go – basically get something out and keep iterating till you have a good product rather than thinking endlessly about incorporating all design specifications before writing a single line of code. Requirements change rapidly nowadays, and unless you are “agile” (pun intended) to that, you will not produce good software.

Agile methodologies, however, don’t work in parliamentary procedures, since there is very high transaction cost there. Take, for example, the proposed Goods and Service Tax (GST). The current form of the Goods and Service Tax is an incredibly flawed bill, with taxes for movement of goods across states and certain products being excluded from the ambit altogether. Mihir Sharma at Business Standard has a great takedown of the current bill (there is no one quotable paragraph. Read the whole thing. I’m mostly in agreement).

So it seems to me that the government is passing the GST in its current half-baked form because it wants some version (like a Minimum Viable Product) off the ground, and then it hopes to rectify the shortcomings in a later iteration. In other words, the government is trying some sort of an agile methodology when it comes to passing the GST.

The problem with parliamentary procedures, however, is that transaction costs are great. Once a law has been passed, it is set in stone and the effort required for any single amendment is equal to the effort originally required for passing the law itself, since you have to go through the whole procedure again. In other words, our laws need to be developed using the waterfall model, and hence have full system requirement specifications in place before they are passed.

It’s not surprising since the procedure for passing laws was laid down back at a time when hardly any programming existed, leave alone agile programming. Yet, it begs the question of what can be done to make our laws more agile (pun intended).

PS: I understand that Agile software development has several features and this iterative nature is just one of them. But that is the only one I want to focus on here.

The problem with Indian agriculture, and government

The problem with the Indian agriculture sector is that the government takes a very “cash view” of the sector while what is required is a “derivative view”.

So Congress VP Rahul Gandhi railed on in a rally about how the current Narendra Modi government is anti-farmer, and pointed out at the land acquisition amendment bill and the lack of raising of “minimum support price” as key points of failure. Gandhi was joined at the rally by a large number of farmers, who reports say were primarily very pissed off about the failure of their rabi crops thanks to unseasonal rains in the last month and a bit.

If the government were to take Gandhi’s criticism seriously, what are they expected to do? Not amend the land acquisition act, or amend it in a different way? Perhaps, and we will not address that in this post, since it is “out of syllabus”. Increase the Minimum Support Price (MSP)? They might do that, but it will do nothing to solve the problem.

As I had pointed out in this post written after a field trip to a farm, what policymakers need understand is that farming is fundamentally a business, and like any other business, there is risk. In fact, given the number of sources of uncertainty that exist, it can be argued that farming is a much riskier business than a lot of other “conventional” businesses.

So there is the risk of high prices of inputs, there is risk of bad weather, there is risk of a glut in supply that leads to low prices, there is a risk that the crop wasn’t harvested at the right time, there is a risk that elephants trampled the field, or there is a risk that there might be a new strain of bugs that might destroy the crops. And so forth. And given that most farmers in India are “small”, with limited land holdings, it needs to be kept in mind that they don’t have diversification as a (otherwise rather straightforward) tool to mitigate their risks.

And when the farmers face so many risks, what does the government do? Help them mitigate at max one or two of it. One of them is the “minimum support price” which is basically a put option written by the government, for free, in favour of the farmers. All it entails is that the farmer is assured of a minimum price for his wares if market prices are too low at the time of harvest. In other words, it helps the farmer hedge against price risk.

What other interventions do Indian governments do in farming? There are straightforward subsidies, all of the input variety. So farmers get subsidised seeds, subsidised fertilisers, subsidised (or in several cases, free) electricity, occasional subsidies in irrigation, subsidised loans (“priority sector lending” rules), and occasionally, when shit hits the fan, a loan waiver.

Barring the last one, it is easy to see that the rest are all essentially input subsidies, making it cheaper for the farmer to produce his produce (I’m proud of that figure of speech here, and I don’t know what it’s called in English). Even loan waivers, while they happen when market conditions are really bad, are usually arbitrary political decisions, and never targeted, meaning that there are always significant errors, of both omission and commission.

So if you ask the question of whether the government, through all these interventions, make the business of farming easier, it should be clear that an answer is no, for while it makes inputs cheaper and helps farmers hedge against price risk, it doesn’t help at all in mitigation of any other risks. Instead, what the government is essentially doing is by paying the farmers a premium (subsidised inputs, free options) and expecting them to take care of the risks by themselves. In other words, small “poor” farmers, who are least capable of handling and managing risk, are the ones who are handling the risk, and at best the government is just providing them a premium!

The current government has done well so far in terms of recognising risk management as a tool for overall wellbeing. For example, the Jan Dhan Yojana accounts (low-cost bank accounts for the hitherto unbanked) come inbuilt with a (albeit small) life insurance cover. In his budget speech earlier this year, the Finance Minister mentioned a plan to introduce universal insurance against accidental death. Now it is time the government recognises the merits of this policy, and extends it to other sectors, notably agriculture.

What we need is a move away from “one delta” cash subsidies and a move towards better risk management. The current agricultural policies of successive governments basically ensure that the farmer makes more when times are good (lower inputs costs, free put options (MSP) with high strike price), and makes nothing when times are bad. Rudimentary utility theory teaches us that the value of a rupee when times are good is much lower than the value of a rupee when times are bad. And for the government, it doesn’t really matter as to when it spends this money, since its economic cycle is largely uncorrelated with farmers’ economic cycles. So why waste money by spending it at a time of low marginal utility as opposed to spending it at a time of high marginal utility?

In other words, the government should move towards an institutionalised system of comprehensive crop insurance. Given the small landholdings, transaction costs of such insurance is going to be high, and the government should help develop this market by providing subsidies. And this subsidy can be easily funded – remember that the government is already paying some sort of a premium to farmers so that they manage their own risk, and part of this can go towards helping farmers manage their risk better.

It is not going to be politically simple, for the opposition (like Rahul Gandhi) will rail that the government is taking money away from farmers. But with the right kind of messaging, and subsidies for insurance, it can be done.

Gerrymandering in Bangalore

So a couple of years back, just before the Karnataka Assembly elections, I had taken a look at Gerrymandering within the constituencies of Bangalore. This picture shows the boundaries of the parliamentary constituencies in the city, and you can see that it is bizarre. For example, parts of the Bangalore North parliamentary constituency (black) lie to the south of all of Bangalore South constituency (green)!

Now, the word “gerrymander” was invented in the 1800s, when one Mr. Gerry, who was the governor of Massachusetts, redrew the districts (constituencies) in the state in order to maximise the chances of his further election victory, and the redrawn districts looked like some kind of a mythical creature, which was given the name “gerrymander”.

Now, while the Bangalore figure above looks bizarre, no doubt, it doesn’t really resemble any animal, mythical or otherwise. However, with the proposed BBMP Restructuring, Bangalore’s wards are in the news again. And I was just looking at the population densities in different wards, and happened to take a look at Padmanabhanagar, which is my current assembly constituency. And this is what it looks like (different components are the different wards within the constituency, and intensity of colouring indicates population density within these wards).

Yes, really, that is the shape of the Padmanabhanagar assembly constituency. If you have any doubts, get the data from http://openbangalore.org and check out for yourself (that’s where I got the mapping data from; density data came from the BBMP Restructuring site – there’s a link there with excel file on areas and populations).

Anyway, so what do you think Padmanabhanagar looks like? To me, this looks like a hen that is running. To Thejaswi Udupa, with whom I shared this picture, it looks like a “hen doing ballet”.

Whatever it is, such gerrymandering leads to atrocious policy and implementation. My house, for example, is very close to the beak of the hen described above. In other words, it’s in one extreme corner of the constituency. Actually, if you look at the portion forming the hen’s head, that’s Yediyur ward, and my house is at one extreme of Yediyur ward, too.

The road outside was dug up a year and half back and hasn’t yet been asphalted. Stone slabs covering storm water drains were removed four months back for desilting and are yet to be placed back. And because we are at one extreme edge of both assembly and BBMP constituencies, neither MLA (R Ashok) nor corporator (NR Ramesh) bothers.

If there were no gerrymandering, there wouldn’t be any “extreme corners” like this one. And that would mean less chance for elected representatives to ignore certain parts. And that would lead to better governance!

Update:

This is what all the constituencies of Bangalore look like (click for a full size image)

Let your imagination run wild!

Getting counted

So I got counted yesterday. And my caste was also noted. This was part of the caste census that is being currently conducted by the state government. I had a few pertinent observations on the questions and procedure, so thought I should write them down here.

The survey team consisted of a man and a woman. I wonder if the gender combination of the surveyors was chosen deliberately, in order to avoid awkwardness in either direction depending upon who opens the doorbell.
Anyway, the man seemed to be the senior person and didn’t speak much. The woman had an extraordinarily large “exam pad” (of A2 size if I’m not wrong), with a sheaf of papers where she would note down the answers.
So after “normal details” such as names and address, the survey proceeded directly to the caste. “Do I have to answer that?”, I asked. They said I didn’t have a choice. I told them and the lady noted it down. Then I was asked about my subcaste. I again asked if I should answer. The woman said yes, but the man overruled and they moved on.
There were other demographic questions involved, which I don’t remember answering during the “general census” four years ago. Stuff like the age at which we got married and the age at which we joined school.
Anyone who can get their hands on the raw data can have a field day looking at the correlations. Like – what is the distribution of age of marriage by caste? etc.
The questionnaire was a pretty long one. A cursory search indicates there are a total of 55 questions. I was also asked about household assets. “How many TVs?” “One” “How many computers?” “Hmm.. Five”. “Laptops?” “I already counted them among computers” and so on.
I got asked about my family income also. Now you can see that all this data along with caste can be used to form some interesting correlations.
And it doesn’t stop there. This is the first time in a census that I’ve been asked for an identity proof. “We want both voter ID card and Aadhaar”, the lady said. I showed our voter IDs, and she noted down the number. Remember that this is a “caste census”? You know where this might be going now. I told them I couldn’t find my Aadhaar, and they said it was okay.
As the lady ploughed through the multiple pages of the extra-large form, I couldn’t help wondering as to why the surveyors couldn’t have been given tablets instead – in terms of the repeated efforts of first filling up the forms and then having to enter the data into the database. Given the size of the form and difficulty of carrying, it would have done the surveyors a huge favour.
Finally, the form was filled with pencil. Ostensibly this was so that if they made any errors in entry, they could correct immediately. I’m assuming there are no “convenient alterations” made.

Thinking about it now (I didn’t think yesterday) I’ve perhaps given away more information than I should have (voter ID number, etc.), and might have compromised on my privacy. I hope, however, that I’m one of those people who gets access to the raw database once it’s compiled (obviously much much easier said than done), given the kind of data that has been collected and the insights that can be drawn from it.

If you are a politician who gets your hands on this data, and want to use that to build your election strategy, you should hire me. There is a wealth of information in this data!