New Delhi. ‘Axis My India chief Pradeep Gupta has blamed ‘lack of judgement’ for his exit poll going wrong and said that taking Uttar Pradesh lightly in the last three phases of the election proved costly for him. Gupta said that because the earlier surveys in the Odisha elections proved wrong, he had shifted his top resources from Uttar Pradesh to the eastern state of the country (Odisha).
Axis My India exit poll had predicted 361-400 seats for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led alliance in the Lok Sabha elections, including a possible win of 67 of the total 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, but the actual election results showed the BJP winning 240 seats and falling short of a majority on its own. It had predicted 131-166 seats for the opposition alliance.
Uttar Pradesh proved to be the biggest upset state for the BJP, where it got only 33 seats. Talking to editors at PTI headquarters, Gupta said that the way Axis My India exit poll was predicting was not wrong, but the deployment of resources in important states was wrong.
He said, “We have a foolproof methodology to predict elections… It was not our methodology that went wrong. I made a mistake in deploying my senior resources and took important states like Uttar Pradesh lightly. It is said that the road to power in Delhi (Centre) goes through Uttar Pradesh. This is a lesson that no state should ever be ignored in case of ‘exit polls’.”
He said, “Although the NDA (BJP-led National Democratic Alliance) formed the government, there was a huge difference between the number of seats we had projected and the number of seats the BJP actually won. We were proven wrong. The three states where we were proven wrong were Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Maharashtra.”
Explaining his analysis of his mistakes, including deployment of resources, Gupta said, “There was a huge difference in seats in the eastern part of UP. Out of 80, 41 seats went to polls in the fifth, sixth and seventh phases. At the same time, Haryana and Delhi went to polls in a single phase, while Punjab and Himachal Pradesh went to polls in the seventh phase.” He said this was the first time that Odisha and Jharkhand also went to polls in these phases.
Gupta said, “Usually, elections in other states used to end in the initial phases and elections were held in West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the last phase. The political scenario in Delhi was also such that Arvind Kejriwal came out of jail just before the elections. The impact of the Aam Aadmi Party was also to be in these three states.” He said, “In the year 2019, we had expressed the right estimate. We were more careful about Odisha this time, so that no mistake is made like last time.”
Fifty-five-year-old Gupta was embroiled in controversy when the opposition alleged that he had deliberately predicted a BJP victory to influence the stock market. After the announcement of the exit polls, the stock market had jumped tremendously and reached a record high, but on the day of counting, it fell down drastically.
He said, “31 resources were sent to different states as observers, trainers or coaches, while no one was sent to Uttar Pradesh and this is where we made a mistake. We had also sent some senior officers from Uttar Pradesh to Bengal, but due to political violence the interview rate there was low and this made a difference.” He said, “The 2024 elections are a lesson for us that no state should be taken lightly, especially states like Uttar Pradesh.”
Gupta said, “Out of 64 crore voters, we spoke to 5.82 lakh voters, which is a representative sample size. We covered 3,607 assembly constituencies and over 22,000 villages. Our on-ground interviews are monitored by a team, there is no chance of any manipulation or bias.”
He said, “All the exit poll companies made similar claims this time. We are always different, but this time we also predicted like them and that is where we lost the opportunity… and that is where we went wrong.” Axis My India has been conducting exit polls since 2013 after Gupta returned from Harvard Business School and claims to have a record of predicting correctly in 65 out of 69 elections.
In the middle of the election, an alleged survey conducted by ‘Axis My India’ was leaked, which said that the BJP has no chance of improving its position in 13 states and it will lose some of the seats it won last time. Gupta dismissed this survey as fake. However, when the results came out, they were close to that survey, which raised suspicion.
He said, “No data can leak from my office… Everything is recorded, nothing is on cloud servers, only on internal servers. Mobile phones are not allowed. No computer has internet connection… We are so confident about the data that there is no question of it leaking.”
Tags: exit poll, Lok Sabha Election 2024, Lok Sabha Elections
FIRST PUBLISHED : June 22, 2024, 15:42 IST