Mint, the Wall Street Journal’s media arm in India, aimed at the nation’s growing ultra-rich class, reported yesterday that annoying outbound political IVR calls have finally made their way to the budding world power.
This is by no means a new development. In 2004, then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, asked voters to vote for his Bharatiya Janata Party and its ruling coalition the National Democratic Alliance in a pre-recorded message. Despite the fact that both the BJP and the NDA were expected to sweep the polls and retain the lead it’d held firmly since 1999 after a brief stumble in ’98. The NDA, however, lost to the Indian National Congress led by Sonia Gandhi, widow of former PM Rajiv Gandhi. Some attributed the loss to increasing unrest among Muslim Indians or the administration’s failure to make meaningful bread-and-butter changes for average citizens, compounded by the INC’s appeals for the “common man,” while others still (and you can count me in this contingent) believe voters may have turned on the NDA because they were annoyed by constant automated calls.
In my case, Speech Heads, annoying IVR has certainly turned me away from many a political candidate. In my hometown for instance, this obsequiously voiced woman was running from City Parks Comptroller. Every day I’d get dinner time calls about how she was going to bring the “winds of reform” to the way swing sets are funded across the city. Her opponent was swindling taxpayers with his boondoggle closed slide projects, nature trail, and dog park. Well, after three of those I was ready to vote for the incumbent and let him fleece the municipal property owners of all they had to build whatever Shangri-La caught his idle fancy.
Despite the conventional wisdom against such IVR calls, however, India seems dead set on proceeding, Mint reports.
“Parties are embracing telecom technologies with greater enthusiasm to connect with the electorate in the 15th Lok Sabha polls,” an unnamed staff reporter writes.
“Five years since the 2004 elections, India’s phone base, including mobile phones and phones of the fixed-line variety, has jumped nearly six times to nearly 430 million, up from some 75 million at the end of March 2004,” he adds.
The article goes on the quote a Mr. Vineet Kaul, vice-president of One97 Communications as saying, “Some parties [declining to name them] have decided to create a so-called IVR and toll-free IVR numbers that a voter can dial and get more information about the local candidates.”
Toll-free numbers? This won’t end well. When you start making automated calls, Speech Heads, you just invite the opposition to build $600,000 playgrounds. As my brother Adam B. says, punching a black leather gloved fist into an open black leather gloved hand, “You wanna move some votes, you need a personal touch.”
