Karnataka: A small Kannada news portal that was bang on with its poll forecast

Eeedina.com (This Day) had predicted a Congress comeback by giving it 132-140 seats, leaving the BJP with 57-65, Janata Dal Secular with 19-25 and others with 1-5 

K.M. Rakesh, TT, Bangalore, 15.05.23 : A Kannada news portal with limited resources got the Karnataka election result right weeks before any of the exit polls came even close to predicting the outcome of the Assembly polls that saw the Congress trouncing the BJP with a margin that left no scope for horse trading.

Eeedina.com (This Day) had predicted a Congress comeback by giving it 132-140 seats, leaving the BJP with 57-65, Janata Dal Secular with 19-25 and others with 1-5.

The final results looked eerily similar to what the portal had forecast in its sample survey conducted between March 3 and April 24 and released on April 27.

The Congress won 135 seats, the BJP 66 and JDS 19. Four seats were won by Independents and other smaller parties.

“We did the scientific random sampling by interviewing more than 40,000 people across the state from March 3 to April 24 by deploying a team of over 1,200 enumerators, 80 per cent of them volunteers,” project head of eedina.com, H.V. Vasu, a doctor, told The Telegraph on Sunday.

He recalled the difficulties ranging from limited finance at their disposal to weeding out even the slightest bias in the enumerators to develop a clear picture of which way the state was going.

“As every individual would have an opinion, many would have a bias for or against one party or the other. Since the objective of the survey was to develop an accurate picture of how the state would vote, we had to make extra efforts to clear any such bias. Otherwise, such biases would have skewed the data,” said Vasu.

Enough care was taken to cover a cross-section of the state’s population, including gender, caste, religion, age groups and such parameters.

“Once we collected and collated the data, we did consult experts to analyse them and help us come to a conclusion on the numbers before we published them,” he recalled.

While the survey’s findings were doing the rounds on social media ever since they were released on April 27 the eventual election results gave it more credibility since the final count was within the bracket of what eedina.com predicted.

Political activist and columnist Sudheendra Kulkarni was among those who lauded the initiative and the pre-poll survey.

“This small but bold portal got it absolutely right nearly a month ago: 130+ for Congress in Karnataka! I was happy to visit this volunteer-based media organisation in Bengaluru. Let’s support such committed not-for-profit ventures,” Kulkarni, who had campaigned for the Congress in the elections, tweeted on Sunday.

Lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan on Sunday lauded the Kannada news portal’s accurate pre-poll survey. “In thecacophony of pre-election surveys and exit polls on the Karnataka elections, an independent and little-known Kannada web portal called Eedina (http://eedina.com) called the election correctly in the last week of April itself. Kudos,” he tweeted on Sunday.

Rajdeep Sardesai of India Today TV, whose channel predicted it right in the exit polls on May 10, had some good words about the edina.com survey conducted over a month ago.

“A big shout out this morning to a small Kannada portal called http://eedina.com . Several days ago they accurately predicted a big Cong win in Karnataka. Getting Numbers right is one thing but their analysis was also spot on. All credit to them for a detailed survey which didn’t have the resources of mainstream media but clearly had some fine minds involved,” Sardesai tweeted.

Swaraj India leader and psephologist Yogendra Yadav, who had commented about the survey even earlier, responded to Sardesai’s tweet. “That’s very generous of you @sardesairajdeep Portals like http://eedina.com have kept up the older tradition where media was the site of resistance. @eedinanews,” he tweeted on Sunday.