From Grama Ninjas to Panchayat Ninjas!
In the recently held Karnataka Grama Panchayat election, 11 Grama Ninja’s submitted their candidacy and 5 of them won. Read on to find out how Reap Benefit worked with these candidates on their first foray into politics.
At Reap Benefit one of our broader, long term goals has been for young people to see local governance as a viable career option in which they can continue to seed and foster change in the communities they live in.
So, when the election commission announced the Grama Panchayat elections, and 21 Solve Ninjas from Nelamangala and Dommasandra showed interest in contesting, you can imagine our excitement! We wanted to offer our support, mentoring and tools to the Solve Ninjas contesting.
Laying the groundwork
Archana KR from Reap Benefit says that the decision to contest for elections stemmed from the Grama Ninjas deep rooted desire to solve problems in their communities.
“These young people had already been problem solving in their communities around issues like drainage and waste, and felt that the opportunity to contest in the Panchayat elections was an opportunity to do more in their communities.”
Gautam Prakash, co-founder of Reap Benefit feels that the power of such grounded and problem solving youth in local politics may well change the default narrative of what one can/cannot do politics.
“These are invested youth, who have entered politics as a way to systematically and systemically solve their local problems. Their core objective might be to solve problems first, and then to retain power which is possibly a deviation from mainstream political efforts so far, where solving problems might be a subset of efforts to retain power,” shares Gautam.
When the Grama Ninjas showed interest, Archana felt that it was a great opportunity to hone leadership skills for these young people and began thinking about how best Reap Benefit could support them.
10 interested Ninjas had to back out as they didn’t have the required documentation in place. In places where there were reservations for women, the Ninjas convinced their mothers/sisters to stand for election.
“This was not easy due to certain entrenched notions in the villages about women standing for elections. But the Grama Ninjas persisted and convinced them to stand for election. Once they had done this they didn’t take over the campaign, rather they trained them in how to campaign, gather information and data.”
Symbols matter!
Once the nomination papers were filed, we worked with the candidates and prototyped campaign symbols that voters could connect to the Grama Ninjas and recall easily when voting.
Archana KR shares how one candidate chose a whistle as his campaign symbol. ‘The main problem in his area was garbage and garbage clearance, and the whistle which is something used by Panchayat workers had a strong connect to the problem and was recognisable.’
Strategy is everything
A well-defined campaign strategy is essential to garnering votes.
‘As these youngsters were already solving local community problems, it seemed a strong and natural platform for their campaign.” says Archana.
Candidates and their team of youth volunteers spoke with villagers to discover what problems they were impacted by most and selected 5 problems to include in their campaign manifesto. These problems where then reported on the Solve Ninja Chatbot.
“Candidates also visited each house in the constituency and collected data about residents — how many people were eligible to vote in the house, caste, the male / female ratio in the house, who they voted for last time and why.” says Archana.
Next, each candidate was asked to analyse the current office holder and find out what their contributions to the village had been during their tenure and what issues they had solved.
“We helped candidates consolidate all the data which they had collected from their door-to-door visits to show
- Socio-Economic Profile
- Gender-wise Distribution
- Age-wise Distribution
- Religion-wise Distribution
- Caste-wise Distribution
- Type of family
This data helped candidates estimate how many votes they would get and how many votes their opponent would get.
Using the data analysis we helped candidates segregate the electorate using what we called the ABC technique.
A — Citizens who would 100% vote for the candidate
B — Swing citizens — who could go either way.
C — Citizens who would not vote for the candidate at all
We suggested that the candidates focus on B category voters and so they and their volunteers visited B category homes and showed them the problems that had been reported on the Solve Ninja chatbot, ending with a request that they vote for them to see these issues solved.
The candidates engaged citizens using WhatsApp everyday to share more details about local issues and reminded them to vote in the upcoming elections.
D-Day
On Voting day, the candidates asked their volunteers to stand in polling booths and ensure voting took place. Transport was arranged for senior citizens to ensure they were able to vote too. At the end of the day, candidates visited each house in the village and thanked them for voting.
Results
“We were amazed when the results came! 5 candidates had won! Of the 6 candidates who lost, 2 lost with vote differences of 24 and 11 votes!” shares Archana. “What was truly admirable was that candidate who lost the election went to all houses again and thanked them again for their support. He promised to continue investing time to to work with the elected representative to solve local problems.”
Gautam Prakash points out that that the youth were at the centre of the winners’ success as they were key to problem sourcing and citizen engagement strategies.
“The Grama Ninjas relied on their youth communities to act as liaisons, or extension arms to collect information, and disseminate information using tech. Indirectly, these youth who support the leader are becoming local problem solvers, who are deeply integrating the Sarkar and Samaaj.”
Next steps
Reap Benefit will continue to support the three Grama Panchayat Ninjas to help them solve the problems which they committed to solving in their manifesto.
Our core goal is to activate civic muscle in the youth and to connect them with local governance to solve problems effectively. Seeing our Grama Ninjas become Panchayat members themselves is going one step further, and ensure that solving community issues are at the heart of local governance.
