Launching Jaagte Raho! campaign in Bangalore

(This post of mine has been reproduced from an entry on iJanaagraha blog)

As the memory of our massive national campaign for Lok Sabha 2009 elections fades into the past, we are all set to rollout an even more intense effort to mobilize electoral participation in urban India – the Jaagte Raho! campaign.

Jaagte Raho! is a long term Janaagraha initiative that inspires values of active citizenship in urban India by bringing out the vote for local, state and union elections; and by promoting participation in neighbourhood areas. The campaign aims to redefine patterns of electoral engagement (voter registration and voter turnout) in 10 cities over the next 5 years, thereby creating a successful model for the rest of urban India.

The first step in this journey were taken on the evening of 15th December when Jaagte Raho! was launched in Bangalore. This couldn’t have happened at a better occasion – a few months prior to the all important local elections in Bangalore!

Bangalore is perhaps the most ill-fated mega city in India – the only one with no elected body at the local level for over 3 years now! Given the importance of local governance in our day to day lives, it is almost a miracle that Bangalore has survived over the past 3 years. But that doesn’t mean much for a city that craves to create a global reputation for itself.

Clearly then, the upcoming BBMP elections present a historic opportunity for the residents of Bangalore to put the life back into its day-to-day governance. But do all of us recognize this as an opportunity? Do majority of Bangaloreans even acknowledge the prominence of local governance in their day-to-day lives? If even some of us do, what are we doing jointly to ensure that we don’t miss out on this opportunity?

These questions have shaped the immediate strategy of Jaagte Raho! campaign in Bangalore. Over the next 3 months, Jaagte Raho! will rollout an intensive awareness and mobilization drive to unite all Bangaloreans in the task of ensuring maximum participation in BBMP elections. At the center of action will be the unique grassroots volunteering position created by this campaign – Area Voter Mitra.

Area Voter Mitras provide local leadership in improving electoral engagement within their polling booth areas (about 1000 voters). They are identified and trained by Janaagraha, and work on the field in close coordination with Janaagraha. However, the uniqueness of being an Area Voter Mitra comes from the fact that they receive formal support from Election Commission of India (ECI) to clean up their voter lists.

The challenge therefore that confronts the Jaagte Raho! campaign is the mobilization of enough Area Voter Mitras to cover all 5000+ polling booths covering BBMP area, within a short span of 2 months. This is where we need all stakeholders of Bangalore – individuals and institutions (RWAs, NGOs, Colleges and Companies) to come forward and commit their energies towards better local governance by joining this campaign.

Launching a campaign like Jaagte Raho! has been possible only after months of preparation and planning. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Chunk of the effort clearly lies ahead of us, the outcomes of which will possibly determine the quality of local governance in Bangalore for the next several years!

My Best Moments from Jaago Re! One Billion Votes campaign

It's incredible that a year has passed away since the Jaago Re! One Billion Votes campaign began. An idea put down into a MS Powerpoint first in early 2008 took the shape of a national voter registration campaign within 6 months, and was launched nationally in Sept 2008. The campaign was active for 8 months targeting the parliamentary elections in April – May 2009.

Over here, I will attempt to put together all the amazing things that I saw happening from the driver’s seat of the campaign. This is not a conclusive piece on the impact of the campaign, just my collection of 10 best moments of this campaign – events and happenings that excited me the most, in no specific order.

1. It was absolutely thrilling to see the number of voter registrations that the campaign managed to rake up, and the associated feeling of “making a difference”. We celebrated the first 1000 and first 10,000 sign-ups by cutting a cake at office. Realizing that the ticker was moving too fast, we made a prudent choice to celebrate only multiples of 1 lakh. The first lakh registrations happened around end of Nov 2008, almost 2.5 months after the campaign launch. The subsequent ones averaged a month each. We celebrated each of them by cutting a cake. Here’s a picture from our celebration of 4 lakh voter registrations.

2. The experience of working with an extraordinarily passionate team at Janaagraha. We started out as a 4 member team (Rajesh, Praveen, Deepthi and I – all from IIT Madras) in July 2008 and expanded to 15 member full time team by Feb 2009. Looking back at the way the team got formed so quickly and with such amazing people, I cannot help but think of it as an act of divine intervention. The average age was just 26 yrs, making it a truly youth driven campaign. The bonding was so strong that we would stay together for a majority of the evenings, not always for work though :). See one of the team pics below:

What was equally amazing was the kind of volunteer energies this campaign attracted across India. More than a thousand volunteers participated, either on a one-off or regular basis, to take leadership in the outreach drives of the campaign.

3. My first meeting with NR Narayana Murthy and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra – two absolute luminaries, to ask them to join on the Advisory Board of this campaign. I was quite nervous on both the occasions and hadn’t it been for Ramesh (Co-founder, Janaagraha) who joined me for both these meetings, I doubt if the outcome would have been the same.

I still recall how talking to Rakeysh for about 20-30 min straight without getting the slightest of reaction (he was completely stone-faced) made me certain that he would junk the idea. Instead, once I finished, he responded saying “It’s a giant of an idea, treat me as your slave…”. That’s Rakeysh for you!

Both NRN and Rakeysh continue to be the Advisory Board of Jaagte Raho campaign, and are as committed to support our work as they were on Day 1. I cant describe the feeling I get when I hear them talk so passionately about this campaign. Following is a pic that shows all three of us, shot at a campaign event at Infosys.

4. The day I participated on the BIG FIGHT show of NDTV, one of the most popular television debate shows in India. The topic was “Youth and Politics” and my co-panelists were Sachin Pilot, ‘Pappu’ Yadav, Sudheendra Kulkarni et al. I didn’t speak too well against these seasoned politicians but I remember how electrifying the atmosphere was the moment debate was thrown open. My best moment came out of a remark Sudheendra Kulkarni made to me before the show began. He complimented me for the campaign and said that if 10 yrs down the line if we see the youth rising to prominence in Indian politics, you should know that Jaago Re had a role to play in that.

5. After the campaign ended, I sent a mail to the team asking them to share their funniest moments. I was totally unprepared for the response the mail received. Some dangerously hilarious stuff came to the front! Sample a couple of these:

• (Rajesh) I got a simple mail from one of our registered users from Gurgaon saying “Your Site Sucks”. As is the standard policy, I wrote back apologizing him for any inconveniences he may have faced and asking him to share what part of our website he faced issues with. The guy replies back promptly, “Sorry there was a typo in my mail, I meant to say - Your Entire Site Sucks”
• (Praveen) I get a call at 3pm on April 30^th, the day Mumbai went to polls. It was a lady from Mumbai complaining that she wasn’t able to register on our website. I told her that we were facing some technical issues and asked her to check after 24 hrs. She insisted that I helped to register her right away. When I asked why was it so urgent, she said because the polling booth is going to close at 5pm today

6. When Meera Sanyal (Country Head, ABN Amro and a candidate from Mumbai South constituency) said in a “We The People” show of NDTV that it was “Jaago Re” voting campaign that inspired her to stand in elections

7. The commitment with which Tata Tea, our partners and sponsors, marketed the campaign. It was a blitzkrieg effort – TV ads, radio spots, internet banner ads, Vote ya Vaat show on Channel V, messaging on millions of tea packs etc. One of these days, I was dialing on the Indian Railways enquiry no. to check the reservation status for my dad and I discovered that the waiting tune was the Jaago Re jingle! I was caught by such surprises at many instances since Tata Tea independently drove their marketing campaign.

8. When I heard a couple of songs composed exclusively for this campaign. Both are brilliant tracks, though I preferred the 2nd one more!

• Thermal and a Quarter did a 5 city rock show tour called “Shut Up and Vote” tour for this campaign, and also composed a title track for this campaign.
• A band from Pune (led by Tamir Khan) got inspired and recorded a brilliant song for the campaign, at their own expense! I ended up making this my morning alarm tune, listening to it over 100 times by now.

9. Numerous small stories that I have heard (and keep hearing till date) from complete strangers that shows how the campaign touched them and made a difference:

• A young girl traveling on Shatabdi Express alongside me flashed a Voter ID card as the identity proof. My eyes opened up and I asked her how she got her Voter ID card made. She said she saw the Jaago Re ad and used the facility on www.jaagore.com to fill out her form. She found the process damn easy and said she even got 10-15 of her friends to register through www.jaagore.com. She had voted for the first time in these elections
• A retired Brigadier I met at Pune a few weeks back told me how much he regretted missing out on his vote all his life since he used to be posted away from home during every election, and because the postal vote system never worked. But during the past general elections, he had returned home. His young college going son got inspired by Jaago re campaign and insisted that his father registered. Both of them registered through the campaign and voted in the elections

10. The change this campaign brought about in me, as an individual. I consider myself very fortunate (a great coincidence of time, circumstances and above all an institution called JANAAGRAHA) to have seen an idea planted by me with modest ambitions take the shape of a dream national campaign. Frankly, within a couple of months of its launch, the campaign outgrew all expectations I ever had from it. By the end of it, a couple of lessons got firmly engraved in my heart, soul and mind:

• No one will believe in your idea unless you do, and keep pushing until the entire world follows suit
• I had heard this before and liked it instantly, but now I live by this quote of Margaret Mead - Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.