Forty-two for the Telangana Rasthra Samithi (TRS), 22 for the Congress and 21 for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
These are not number of seats, but the apps that pop up on an online playstore. The 2018 Telangana Assembly elections were expected to be a game changer in terms of the way social media and apps are used to mobilise voters and mould opinion, but those have proved to be something of a non-starter. Instead of a limited number of focussed apps, there is a deluge of them that can confound even the most tech-savvy person, leave alone a voter in a village or mofussil area.
Source of distraction
The apps flooding the playstore have been created by parties, party workers, fans and entrepreneurs. The result is a huge amount of confusion for people about which app is official and which is not. One of the apps is called ‘TRS Membership App’. “I am a big fan of KCR [caretaker Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao] and Telangana, and have developed the app out of personal interest. We have data for the people who downloaded it, but we are not doing anything with the app,” says Srinivas Mogilipala of Versatile Mobitech.
Error reports
Other entrepreneurs have similarly developed apps and launched them on the playstore, with confounding results. “I tried several times to enrol myself but the app failed to accept the particulars. Please rectify the problem,” reads the review for one of the membership apps. The Telangana Congress has launched what is being called an AI-driven web-based application. “The Congress Human Resources Management System or CHARMS is cloud-based and reaches out to the booth-level workers of the party who can login, communicate and give feedback. We realised this is a better way to reach out to party workers and voters,” said Madan Mohan Rao, head of Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee’s IT cell. One entrepreneur has created dozens of apps for various parties with limited functionality and use. “I have developed these apps on my own. I want to monetise them by showing ads,” says the creator of the apps.
The dozens of apps, however, add to the confusion.
Unlike social media accounts, apps are powerful tools that can create a powerful ecosystem for political parties, their leaders and their supporters. Across the border, Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf is known to have used a phone app in a major way to track voters. On the day of voting, it was used to bring voters to the polling booths.
It remains to be seen how Telangana, the fastest growing IT power hub, manages the election fever.