Six leading polling agencies are in talks to form an Indian Polling Council, a self-regulatory industry body of pollsters which hopes to bring about greater transparency and improved standards in opinion polling.
“The idea is for polls to be opened up to peer scrutiny. We can think about opening the data up to the public and the media, but as a first step, the data should be shared within the group,” Yashwant Deshmukh, managing director and chief editor of the polling agency CVoter, told The Hindu. The five other polling agencies, all of which are well-known and some of which conduct both market research and electoral polls, confirmed to The Hindu that they have been discussing the formation of the Council, but some asked that their names not be mentioned until the plans were finalised.
“The problem is not with getting polls wrong, but the question is why they are getting it wrong,” Mr. Deshmukh said. “If polling agencies are actually collecting the information as they say they are, they should be ok with sharing it with peer agencies,” he said. The Council will create a standard declaration form which will require all participating pollsters to state the methodology, sample size, sampling methodology and demographic details, margin of error, who commissioned the poll and other details. “If they choose not to, then the onus is on the media whether they want to use the poll,” Mr. Deshmukh said.
India’s opinion polling industry has faced some heat, particularly for state elections including the Delhi assembly election this February and the Bihar election on Sunday. However seasoned pollsters are critical of the media for using data from pollsters who are not upfront about their sample details and methodology. “They [the media] treat polls like the satta bazaar [betting market],” a leading pollster told The Hindu. “If someone gets it right once, they are king. Next time someone else gets it right, they are king. Nobody is looking at methodology,” he added. “Now everyone has learnt to say our sample was 5-6,000 and split by caste, age group etc. But there is no way of knowing if they are really doing the poll properly,” another long-time pollster said.
“Across the world, pollsters follow self-regulation if at all - they are not regulated by the state,” Sanjay Kumar, one of India’s most respected political analysts, and director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), which also conducts opinion polls, said. However, there was a fact-finding attempt to understand what went wrong when countries like the United Kingdom got their recent polls wrong, Mr. Kumar said - “In India, there isn’t any such introspection,” he added.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha election and in some subsequent state elections, the polling agency Today’s Chanakya got the result largely right. The agency’s methods are somewhat unorthodox: its polls are put into the public domain and not exclusively commissioned by one media agency, the number of constituencies sampled is not disclosed, and its polling methodology consists of face-to-face interviews, pen-and-paper questionnaires and “mystery shopping”, a tool usually used in market research that involves not disclosing to the respondent that he or she is being interviewed for a poll.
Today’s Chanakya’s Bihar exit poll called the election comfortably for the NDA. On Monday, the agency offered this mea culpa: “[W]e found that a simple computer template coding marking the alliances got interchanged at our end. Due to this our seat numbers remained the same but respective alliances got interchanged. And we are looking into the reasons that why it happened.” “Our boys and girls who go out into the field get the responses and we code them here. Due to some error, we mixed up the party names,” CEO V K Bajaj told The Hindu.
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