Brokers react while trading during the presentation of the budget at a stock brokerage firm in Mumbai, February 1, 2018.

In a first, right when Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was presenting his fifth Union Budget in the Lok Sabha - a tricky balance between populism and prudence, an analytics team in a room in sprawling Shastri Bhawan near the Parliament was gauging the impact of the Budget and each proposal and the promise in it.

Composed of a handful of ex-IITians, the team with a few laptops and several monitors with charts and diagrams signaled the birth of a new trend in government policy announcements and monitoring public response across various platforms.

HOW THE DATA WAS PROJECTED

The data was projected quickly and in real-time. On different screens, there were doughnut curves with patches of green, red and grey. With each second, the patches of red would grow or diminish, with a corresponding increase in green segments.

Each green represented a positive response to the announcements being made by the finance minister in his speech. Each red a negative, while grey spectrum indicated neutral responses.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley holds his briefcase during a photo opportunity as he leaves his office to present the federal budget in the parliament.

WHY IT WAS DONE

A member of the data analytics specialists said, "We had set up this unit to monitor open data platforms, including social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, articles and comments on pages. The rules were pre-set to ensure that responses to different sector wise announcements collected from these would get categorised and be depicted through doughnut charts."

A senior Information and Broadcasting Ministry (I&B) official said that the idea behind the analytics set up was to study who was consuming which Budget proposal and how, which one was creating the desired perception, and whether the proposals were reaching the target audience.

WHO WAS BEING MONITORED

The incoming responses ranged from direct beneficiaries, target groups like industrialists, traders, commentators, experts, bloggers, journalists and influencers across social platforms.

Sites like Twitter make things easy as they have a ready list of top influencers in different fields and streams who can be monitored.

HOW THE AUDIENCE RESPONDED TO THE 2018 BUDGET

For example, the screens lit up with green when the finance minister read out the proposal for adding to the list of crops that would come under the one and half times Minimum Support Price (MSP) scheme.

The screens remained green as Jaitley spoke about NITI Aayog setting up a mechanism for compensation of farmers in case of MSP prices not accruing to them.

However, bits of reds soon emerging on the doughnut chart.

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"In the case of agriculture the target- farmers are beyond monitoring range. They will hear about the proposals slowly and their response will take a long time. But the influencers are responding. These are known farm sector experts who are reacting on different platforms. The larger patch of green shows that the response is positive. The good thing is that the grey neutral zone too is large," said one of the analytics team members.

Similar responses were recorded for proposals on education, defence, reforms, GDP, government programmes.

Arun Jaitley presenting Union Budget 2018-19 in Parliament.

The infrastructure proposals got the government a large patch of green compared a relatively small arc of red. But the big buzz over the agriculture and infrastructure proposals soon started getting dwarfed by the response to the National Health Protection Scheme announced by the finance minister. The green signalling, a thumbs up, was a wide patch and the grey one along with totalled 90 per cent of the response.

"This scheme is getting a huge response. The negative is very low. And the buzz from this scheme is drowning most of the discussion taking place across the platforms," said one of the team members.

"The buzz from various points had one common confusion (sic). Those who heard the speech did not get a clear idea who exactly is going to pay the premium for the health policy. Since it's the central government if there was clarity the positive would have far outstripped the negative which is more worry (sic) about how the scheme will be implemented," he added.

The team was cataloging the responses periodically - marking the highs and lows of positives and negatives.

THE HIGHS AND LOWS

The health scheme, the corporate tax reduction, and anti-pollution green proposals were the big hits.

On the other hand, the no change in the direct tax salary slabs (not a big reduction in income tax for salaried class) drew flak. The team members said, "The finance minister started by saying he is not going to change the slabs. But later he announced a Rs 40,000 standard deduction. But by that time the middle class was swinging in another direction."

The next big tsunami of opinions- more negative and ridiculing rose over the hike in salaries of members of Parliament with a five-year auto inflation-linked increment.

Interestingly, the maximum responses were coming from Delhi, Maharashtra and Gujarat, where Maharashtra topped the list. The regional responses had a sector connect. For example, pollution made Delhi chatter more. Corporate tax, income tax, long-term capital gains tax, resonated hugely across Maharashtra.

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The negatives depicted by red too had a subtext. The reds were experts and political parties. Interestingly, it was analysed that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was the most active political rival of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in building an opposition against the budget proposals.

After the Budget, Congress president Rahul Gandhi didn't launch a frontal attack against the government. Across the platforms, the Congress remained responsible, tactically smart opposition.

A WELCOME CHANGE FROM THE PAST?

The Information and Broadcasting Ministry till a few years ago was sluggish and trapped in the old-world style of functioning. But post a paradigm shift pushed by PM Narendra Modi the information dissemination system has improved hugely.



A senior I&B ministry official said that the analytics process is on trial right now. It's monitoring all of India and the pressure points across the world. He said the data collected is throwing a lot of information which cannot only be used to shape contours of future policies but also about the language used to announce policies.

Sources say that the analytics set up is currently on trial and could become a permanent feature, where real-time public responses may cure the old problem of polices never moving beyond paper on which they were designed.

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