Pradeep Gupta- The one sane voice in the world of India psephology which is occupied by people like Yogendra Yadav

Pradeep Gupta led Axis My India (AMI) has once again got the exit polls right in the Delhi assembly elections. The Mumbai based polling agency predicted 59-68 seats for AAP and 2-1 seats for BJP. When the final results were released, they were close to what India Today-AMI had predicted with 62 seats for AAP and 8 for BJP. Congress, as predicted by AMI, scored nil in the elections. Gupta danced in the studio of Indian Today after the prediction of the agency fit spot on with results.

The accurate predictions have maintained the winning streak of AMI which had predicted 2019 Lok Sabha elections and every assembly election after that with cent per cent accuracy. AMI got exit polls right in Maharashtra, Haryana, and Jharkhand as well. 

After the spot-on predictions of Lok Sabha elections, where the polling agency got the number of seats by BJP exactly right at 303, Pradeep Gupta, Director and CMD of AMI, broke down on live national television and thanked his team for the success of the company.

“I had full faith in my team who has been working rigorously for the past 40 days in each and every LokSabha constituency and also assembly constituencies. Training [to ask the right questions] was the major part of our success story so far. Our 500+ field force is our strength,” Gupta said.

Born in a small village in Madhya Pradesh in the early 70s, Gupta reached Mumbai in 1993 to work with an advertising agency after his short stint in Thompson Press, New Delhi. “They were days of great struggle and like all other bachelors living in shared accommodation, I too lived in a cramped apartment, sharing them with several other boys. I lived in several neighbourhoods across the city and briefly in Vasai too,” recalls Gupta who now lives in Vile Parle and has an office in Andheri East.

Gupta took to poll predictions in 2013 and since then has worked on around 40 exit polls, with above 95 per cent accuracy. “In fact in the assembly polls at the end of last year, my predictions were 100 per cent accurate,” boasts Gupta.

For Jharkhand assembly election, AMI predicted 24-28 seats for Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the party got 28 seats while JMM+ alliance as well as BJP, AJSU and JVM also won the seats within the bandwidth of the agency.

According to Gupta, understanding the psychology of the voter is key. It is best to talk to the voter once she reaches and is relaxed. In India, no one wants to tell whom they have voted in front of others, due to insecurity.

Most of the pollsters based in Delhi are too ideological to go with empirical evidences. People like Yogendra Yadav, who made a career in psephology, improved the discipline in India by taking on the Communist stranglehold. But in later days, Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and Yogendra Yadav became too aligned with the socialist ideology to get the predictions right.

Almost all the Delhi based exit poll agencies like Lokniti-CSDS, C-voter and Chanakya have people at the top who are too aligned with a certain ideology and have prejudices, to understand the psychology of the voters.

In India, the issues of caste, class, religion, identity and ideology are too intermingled to be understood by a person who has ideological prejudices. And therefore, the Mumbai based agency, which goes by empirical data, gets the predictions right.