DailyPost 1660
POLITICAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
One tea seller used missed calls for taking his orders, there would be tons of other innovative methods using the technology. Given the COVID-19 times, technology has become our mainstay. There has been a push towards information technology in the government over the last decade or so or even earlier. We remember the days of Chandrababu Naidu forays into IT when he was the CM of undivided Andhra Pradesh. Tales of his usage of technology and data for day-to-day governance are all well known. Has the political clan taken to information technology or have they remained on the periphery while literally everything is switching over to the digital mode.
Has there been even one class or lecture in the last two decades making them understand the ways in which they should use information technology? Have they been taught about the utility of data while the Data Protection Bill waits for its rites of passage? Have they been made to believe that low end technology usage for settling political scores is the only way technology can be used? That life is sans privacy as all of us know, are the politicians aware of it, or else they would keep on landing in one problem after the other. While lakhs of laptops get distributed on their orders, how many of them are comfortable with tools of the present day, to facilitate their work.
Laptops and iPads would have been distributed many times over, to our parliamentarians / legislators / political executive, but what has been their skill and delivery upgrade. Are even a few of them interested in it or is it a waste of time for them. Best of the bandwidth is made available to them. What we get in return is at times some legislators get caught indulging in things, that should not happen in any legislature. Then we have videos getting viral and political fortunes being decided on that; sting or honeypot and what not. We hear a clamour for validation of the video, forensic examination, whether it has been doctored or not. Recently, an audio chat leaked during the W. Bengal elections. One would always find their care free world worth romanticizing.
The rest of the IT technologies for the politician converges in the Social Media. A media they love to live for and to die with. Poll strategists are born to handle this media. Multi media doctoring of what is their make believe story is the political information technology of India. What an ignominy, the IT cells of political parties have very little to do with technology. Post truth is their life. Technology starts with twitter and ends with Facebook and the prima donna of political campaigning WhatsApp. Booth level WhatsApp groups are the final frontier which they have broken. What was left was being sorted out in an interview of a political strategist with a top TV editor / journalist in a top hotel in Kolkata.
POLITICAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PUTS IT ON ITS HEAD.
Sanjay Sahay