- Nearly 10 crore new voters added since 2004, 4.3 crore in the age group of 18-22 years.
- BJP launched the Advani@campus campaign targeting nearly 5 lakh students in 5,500 campuses. The party is also getting ready to launch their own online social networking site this week.
- Congress plans to highlight their youth-centric focus by way of the new IITs, IIMs, IIITs they have set up. Also using Facebook to seek votes from young voters.
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C.S. Krishna, an IIM graduate who interned with the CPI(M) in the summer of 2007, got an insight into the political process. "I saw the social costs of everyday business decisions and policies. I realised then that we have to be part of a greater political process, where we volunteer our time and efforts," Krishna says. His immediate juniors in IIM took the political experiment a step further to work with two Gujarat MPs—the Congress's Madhusoodan Mistry and the BJP's Hiren Pathak—to understand India's complex political process.
Anil Gupta, professor at IIM, Ahmedabad, was a key mentor to the student's efforts to see politics from a closer perspective: "The problem with India's youth is that they are impatient. No one wants to work their way up the system. No one wants to begin as a municipal councillor who can improve his locality. They all want to start at the top."
This year, NGO Janaagraha began an exercise through a web initiative,www.jaagore.com, to register new voters. At last count, they had nearly 5,45,000 new registrations, in part through a successful TV ad campaign. That's the challenge for political parties: connect with the young first, and then figure out how to get them out to vote on polling day.
