Vijayawada, India – As quickly as Meda Ramana was elected the top of Garapadu village council within the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, a number of residents complained to her of being wrongfully excluded from authorities welfare schemes.
About 50 villagers – principally girls of the Dalit, Indigenous and religious-minority communities – instructed her in early 2021 that their annual welfare advantages, of 10,000 rupees ($119) to 120,000 rupees ($1,430), below varied schemes, had been abruptly stopped by the state authorities.
At first look, it appeared to be an innocuous knowledge entry error. However when Ramana enquired in regards to the causes, workers on the village secretariat instructed her the villagers have been ineligible for the welfare as a result of they’d “migrated”. Ramana instructed the secretariat that the complainants have been very a lot residing there, however to no avail.
She then complained to larger officers within the district administration who ordered the village workers to conduct a probe. However the village workers ignored these directives. It was at this level that Ramana started to scent a political ploy.
Andhra Pradesh is likely one of the two states that held regional elections in Might 2024, in the course of the time of India’s nationwide ballot that re-elected the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Celebration (BJP). The Andhra Pradesh state election was fought between two dominant regional events – the incumbent YSR Congress Celebration (YSRCP) and the Telugu Desam Celebration (TDP).
The TDP received, however within the run-up to the elections, the outgoing YSRCP authorities ran a complicated, data-driven voter affect marketing campaign that wrongfully denied poor and susceptible communities their welfare advantages as a result of members of these communities have been more likely to vote for the opposition, our investigation reveals.
A number of media studies have highlighted how governing events in India – the BJP on the nationwide degree and others within the states – have accessed and misused government-collected private knowledge of residents in previous elections. The TDP did the identical when it was in energy in Andhra Pradesh in the course of the earlier election in 2019.
Our investigation reveals, for the primary time, the real-world hurt brought on by such misuse – with the susceptible being denied their rightful welfare advantages and their rights to train free selection in elections undermined.
Welfare supply was a significant election plank in Andhra Pradesh. The then-incumbent YSRCP authorities mentioned it transferred about 4.3 trillion rupees ($50.7bn) in its five-year time period to about 127.4 million poor and marginalised individuals, together with by way of pensions and housing and meals help.
It appointed paid “volunteers” to “proactively” ship welfare at residents’ doorsteps, changing the standard methodology during which elected village councils, referred to as panchayats, administered the welfare.
One volunteer was appointed for each 50 households – roughly 260,000 volunteers lined greater than 1.3 million households within the state. Each volunteer was paid 5,000 rupees ($60) per 30 days from the state exchequer.
The YSRCP authorities additionally gave this military of volunteers unfettered powers and technological instruments to indiscriminately harvest the private knowledge of residents. It used the information to create voter “profiles” and predict their political decisions.
The knowledge was then utilized by the federal government volunteers and YSRCP cadres to affect these voters together with by way of doubtful techniques like excluding opposition-inclined voters from welfare schemes.
When Ramana and her husband regarded by way of the listing of Garapadu’s excluded households in 2021, they noticed a sample. “All of the wrongly-excluded households have been supporters of TDP”, the opposition get together on the time, claimed Sagar, Ramana’s husband who can be an lively TDP employee.
The couple concluded that the “village volunteers”, have been singling out TDP supporters and chopping off their advantages “to pressurise them to modify their help to YSRCP”.
In April 2022, 27 girls from Garapadu filed a case within the state’s excessive court docket in opposition to the village volunteers and authorities officers for “illegally” chopping off their advantages for “political causes”. The court docket discovered the ladies have been “eligible” for the schemes and reprimanded the state for the village volunteers’ “unlawful actions”.
The ladies’s advantages have been resumed after the court docket’s order and residents of a number of different villages from the state filed greater than 100 comparable complaints in court docket the identical 12 months, mentioned G Arun Showri, a lawyer who represented the Garapadu petitioners within the excessive court docket.
“All claimed the village volunteers blocked welfare advantages of eligible claimants who have been supporters of the opposition get together,” Showri mentioned.
However how did the volunteers know the political preferences of villagers? A evaluation of the volunteer scheme’s paperwork – service contracts, supply code of the software program utility they used, official WhatsApp teams – and greater than a dozen interviews with political employees, marketing campaign managers and voters, revealed the tactic.
Predicting voting decisions
The volunteers have been required to conduct a “baseline survey” of the assigned households utilizing a cellular utility. An evaluation of the supply code of the app, first carried out by internet-governance researcher Srinivas Kodali, reveals knowledge to be collected for each resident – together with their residence deal with, employment and household data comparable to knowledge on caste, faith, training and well being standing (with granular particulars comparable to ailments and pregnancies).
These have been meticulously recorded and always monitored. The supply code evaluation was reviewed and verified by this correspondent.
The volunteers carried out periodic surveys, together with over WhatsApp, to maintain the profiles up to date. Every volunteer was allotted a WhatsApp group of fifty households. The volunteers recorded knowledge on the “felt wants” of the residents and their “suggestions” in regards to the governance.
“Volunteers will establish the issues being confronted by residents of their jurisdiction, and the identical shall be dropped at the discover of presidency officers to get them resolved,” mentioned the federal government order for recruiting volunteers.
Sagar, Ramana’s husband, mentioned: “Due to this persistent monitoring of households over 5 years within the title of presidency surveys, the volunteers have change into conscious of the entire profile of the households, together with their likes and dislikes, psychological stresses and monetary issues. They’ll then simply assess which family is a supporter of the YSRCP authorities, the opponents and impartial voters.”
Bhaskar Basava, a journalist in Andhra Pradesh, mentioned the YSRCP had shaped committees at each polling sales space to segregate the voters into “YSRCP-inclined”, “opposition-inclined” and “impartial” classes, with the help of the volunteers. “They even colour-coded the voters within the voter lists to mark these classes,” he recalled.
N Ramesh Kumar, a former Andhra Pradesh election commissioner and secretary of the nonprofit Citizen for Democracy, mentioned the scheme was “one of the crucial refined, ubiquitous and far-reaching data-driven voter manipulation campaigns ever designed by a political get together – far greater than Cambridge Analytica.” He was referring to the United Kingdom-based political consultancy that mined the social-media knowledge of voters within the UK and america to foretell their political inclinations.
The Andhra Pradesh authorities volunteers “mixed intensive door-to-door surveys with authorities databases to create exceptionally correct voter profiles”, Kumar defined.
Private knowledge Wild West
Political events internationally gather knowledge on voters’ wants and preferences by way of surveys to focus on them in campaigns. However when residents’ knowledge, collected by way of the equipment of presidency, is accessed and misused by the governing get together, it distorts the extent taking part in area by giving the get together an unfair benefit.
India has not enacted a private knowledge safety legislation that protects the misuse of residents’ knowledge by state and non-state actors, regardless of the nation’s Supreme Courtroom in 2018 directing the federal government to take action.
Kodali, the web governance researcher, calls the village volunteers’ operations in Andhra Pradesh “a basic case of cybernetics”, referring to the science of communication and management in machines and people.
“Any organised actor can gather a great deal of private knowledge of residents in India as a result of there is no such thing as a legislation to stop it … Management over individuals is exercised when knowledge results in exclusion or concern of exclusion amongst individuals. Via welfare exclusions of the poor, YSRCP exactly tried to realize that,” Kodali instructed Al Jazeera.
Tejasi Panjiar, a former affiliate coverage counsel on the New Delhi-based nonprofit Web Freedom Basis, mentioned such operations “can be held unlawful in different democracies such because the EU and Australia which have strict knowledge safety legal guidelines”.
“This type of operate creep, when residents enable the federal government to gather their knowledge for one goal [like welfare delivery] however the knowledge is misused for one more goal, is in opposition to the rules of knowledge safety and violates residents’ proper to privateness.”
YSRCP president and former Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy’s workplace didn’t reply to e-mail queries. The get together’s nationwide spokesperson, Ok Ravi Chandra Reddy, mentioned he was not appearing on behalf of the get together “in the intervening time”.
Designed to misuse
The volunteer scheme was executed by the YSRCP authorities in session with the election administration consultants employed by the get together.
The YSRCP authorities recruited volunteers from every village based mostly on interviews by an advert hoc committee of native authorities workers, and never by way of a centralised recruitment examination, the scheme paperwork present.
“Solely the names really useful by native YSRCP leaders would get chosen,” Ramana mentioned. A number of get together employees Al Jazeera spoke with echoed this.
The federal government then created a parallel system of governance, managed and run by election strategists who intently labored with it, to supervise and direct the volunteers’ work.
The federal government floated a young in November 2019 to rent a area operations company (FOA) to “design, develop and handle” a sturdy technology-enabled utility to “collect suggestions on service supply and gather individuals’s aspirations and grievances on a steady foundation” and analyse the information collected by the volunteers.
The contract was bagged by a consortium of firms led by Raminfo Ltd. The contract was initially for one 12 months till March 2021 at a price of 686 million rupees ($8.1m) and was later prolonged for one more 12 months at a further 675 million rupees ($7.9m). The consortium was additionally tasked with growing and sustaining an information portal for volunteers till March 2024.
The FOA, which on its X account described itself as a “liaison physique between the federal government of AP [Andhra Pradesh] and the village volunteers”, promoted YSRCP from its now-deleted X (previously Twitter) account, together with posts on how the residents of AP needed YSRCP to come back again to energy. Al Jazeera accessed the FAO’s deleted tweets utilizing Wayback Machine.
To watch the volunteers’ work within the area and coordinate with the federal government departments, the FOA employed massive numbers of workers, in line with the tender doc, together with on the state, district and mandal ranges, creating a sequence of command in that order. (Mandal is an administrative unit between village and district ranges.)
LinkedIn profiles of a number of FOA coordinators present they have been employed from a political consultancy agency known as the Indian Political Motion Committee, or IPAC, an previous strategist for the YSRCP.
“The FOA and IPAC labored intently with the YSRCP leaders to advertise the get together. It was the seamless integration of all from the state degree to village degree. There was no distinction between the federal government programmes and the get together programme,” mentioned Kumar of Citizen for Democracy.
Raminfo mentioned “as FOA was an e-Governance undertaking, we participated within the tendering course of and accomplished the undertaking a lot previous to the elections.”
“Our scope is restricted to the coaching of volunteers on schemes/applications developed by departments. Volunteers are appointed and managed by the Authorities. We didn’t construct any apps or software program for the volunteers’ duties or operations. Our contract/settlement/relationship is just with the person division which floated the RFP,” the corporate added.
An IPAC spokesperson mentioned in a WhatsApp textual content that “IPAC doesn’t have entry to/nor do they use voter knowledge”.
Seamless integration
In response to a Proper to Data request, the state authorities claimed that each one the information collected by the volunteers’ app was secured within the state’s knowledge centre and was solely shared with the federal government departments after signing “consent/entry types” with the respective division, with out giving extra particulars.
In follow, nonetheless, nothing stopped volunteers from sharing their granular insights on every family they tracked with the native YSRCP leaders.
A former volunteer in Garapadu, who spoke on situation of anonymity, mentioned the information collected from all of the surveys carried out by the volunteers was first shared with the native YSRCP leaders earlier than it was submitted to the officers chargeable for welfare schemes.
“Native YSRCP leaders would inform us to govern the beneficiaries lists and take away TDP supporters and impartial villagers from them. We might then inform these villagers to hitch the YSRCP get together to avail advantages of the schemes,” he mentioned.
For these beneficiaries who obtained welfare advantages, native YSRCP leaders had entry to granular knowledge of each penny they bought, which they utilized in campaigns. A number of posts in the course of the election marketing campaign and accessible on X present the get together leaders handing pamphlets to particular person households, addressed within the title of the top of the household, with particulars of all the advantages they obtained through the years, asking them to vote for the YSRCP.
The federal government-appointed volunteers, YSRCP’s native leaders and its election managers labored as well-integrated groups, as evident from this YouTube video launched by a YSRCP-affiliated channel instructing the volunteers how they wanted to marketing campaign for the get together. It requested volunteers to go to door-to-door with YSRCP leaders, survey the voter sentiments in regards to the authorities and inform the voters how the YSRCP authorities was higher than the earlier one.
The mixing of volunteers and get together employees was additionally evident from the official WhatsApp teams created for the welfare schemes. All 13 volunteers in Garapadu village have been managing WhatsApp teams that had at the very least one member from every family that was being tracked.
These 13 volunteers have been a part of one other group that had district-level authorities officers and YSRCP leaders as members. That’s the place they “obtained data/directions which wanted to be circulated amongst villagers”, the previous volunteer in Garapadu instructed Al Jazeera.
Whereas formally, the WhatsApp teams have been meant just for communication associated to the federal government welfare scheme, the screengrabs of the teams present volunteers had despatched messages selling the YSRCP. Among the messages within the teams – analysed by WhatsApp Watch, a platform by Princeton College’s Digital Witness Lab, which research using WhatsApp in political campaigns – have been based mostly on misinformation that denigrated the TDP.
After it obtained a number of complaints of government-appointed volunteers campaigning for YSRCP, the Election Fee of India on March 20 filed felony instances in opposition to them for “unduly influencing elections”. Ten days later, the fee barred all volunteers from finishing up their actions, together with disbursing welfare advantages.
Whereas the YSRCP finally misplaced the elections, its misuse of non-public knowledge created a harmful template for the state to discriminate in opposition to residents based mostly on their political beliefs.
“Such granular profiling of voters by the state can result in the tip of the key poll. It’s going to change into very simple to foretell who’s going to vote for whom. And the [Andhra Pradesh] instance reveals how this data could be weaponised in opposition to the susceptible,” mentioned Shivam Shankar Singh, a former political advisor and writer of the books, The Artwork of Conjuring Alternate Realities and How one can Win an Indian Election.
With inputs from Prudhviraj Rupavath in Vijayawada.
(Kumar Sambhav is an impartial journalist and India Analysis Lead with Princeton College’s Digital Witness Lab)