Techies work hard for BJP manifesto

BENGALURU: Thirty-five-year-old Mallikarjun Biradar leaves home in the morning at 8 am to reach his office, a multinational company. His house is just a few minutes away from office at JP Nagar. For the last few weeks, he has been leaving his office at 6 pm just to reach BJP’s IT cell office in Malleshwaram at 7 pm.Mallikarjun is one among the 70 members of the BJP’s IT team which is working day and night. All the team members are either working with a software firm or own a startup. 

They work here for no payment. “Since it’s election time, there’s such a lot of work. I started coming to work here between 7 pm to 11 pm everyday during weekdays, and during weekends for two full days,” Mallikarjun says.

The IT team is preparing manifestos by forming a team of five at every assembly constituency, who will collect the local issues from 200 to 500 experts who are localities. The constituency level IT team will collect suggestions from these people either through letters or audio recording or video recording. This data will be sent to the head office in Bengaluru. The IT cell will enter the data, segregate and analyse to make region-based draft manifestos.

Forty-eight-year-old Satish Keshav Murthy, who runs a career consultancy agency has also taken a break for two months just to work with the IT cell.“Even after the manifesto work is completed, there will be more work till elections. I will go for campaigning too at Padmanabha Nagar,” he added.

K Amresh, state convenor of the BJP IT Cell said Karnataka was the first state to start IT Cell in 2007. “Initially it was just for designing the website, blogging and content writing. Later, we started a separate social media cell from last year. Bengaluru has a large number of IT employees so we thought of starting the IT cell,” he added.