NEW DELHI: With Lok Sabha elections just a few weeks away, PM Modi has received a massive thumbs up in a mega Times Group online poll, with over two-thirds (83%) of the over 2 lakh respondents who took the survey saying a Modi-led NDA government was the most-likely possibility after the polls.

The poll also indicates that the Prime Minister’s personal popularity remains high. With the official announcement of the

days away, 84% of respondents said that they would prefer

as PM candidate if

were held today.

Congress president

is a distant second as the most-preferred choice for PM among online voters, with 8.33% voting for him, followed by 1.44% for Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, 0.43% for BSP supremo Mayawati and 5.9% predicting another political leader as the next PM.

However, when asked if they considered Rahul Gandhi more popular today compared to 2014, as many as 31% responded in the affirmative, while 63% felt the opposite.

Significantly, only 3.47% respondents see a non-NDA, non-UPA mahagathbandan government as a likely scenario after the Lok Sabha poll.

The poll was conducted online between February 11 and 20 in 9 languages across 13 media properties of the Times Group. The results were concealed from respondents during the 10 days of online polling to negate motivated voting. Almost half a million voted for this survey, however, in order to negate any attempt at gaming the result, ONLY logged in users’ votes (over 2 lakh) were considered, ensuring that only one vote per person was counted.

When asked to rate five years of the

, over two-third of respondents rated its track record as good or very good. Out of this, 'very good' accounted for 59.51% and 'good' for 22.29%. About 8.25% termed it as average, while 9.9% found it to be poor.

The online survey asked respondents to rate the biggest successes as well as failures of the Modi government. On successes: 34.39% respondents rated more access to facilities for the poor from various schemes as their top choice, followed closely by implementation of GST (29%).

Interestingly, lack of progress on Ram temple was rated by respondents (35.72%) as the biggest failure of the Modi government. Compared to this, 29.5% of those who took the survey rated job-creation as the biggest failure.

In fact, job-creation has emerged as a primary concern for voters with 40.2% rating it as the biggest issue in the upcoming general election. Farmer distress was rated as the second biggest issue identified by respondents (21.8%) and while Ram mandir was seen as the biggest failure, only 10% see it as an important issue in the Lok Sabha polls.

On the question of whether minorities felt insecure under the present government, a majority of respondents (65.5%) said they did not think so. However, 24.2% said minorities do feel insecure.

Whether the 10% quota for economically weaker sections, which has recently been passed by a Constitutional amendment will help the government in elections, 72.6% of respondents say that this will help BJP in the Lok Sabha elections.

On the contentious and hot topic of Rafale too, the result is quite interesting. Despite the political slugfest, only 17.5% say it will have a negative impact politically on the NDA in the upcoming election, while a whopping 74.6% say it will have no negative impact.