Bangalore Apartments Federation

Bengaluru

BAF

Mahanagara

Srikanth Narasimhan

Google

STP

has started a campaign to encourage the city’s urban middle-class apartment dweller to vote, in an effort to be taken seriously by the political class, which has ignored them so farIf you, a common citizen, have a problem and no one in authority is interested in helping you out, what’s the easiest way to make yourself heard? Vote. Find a political outfit that will align itself with your cause(s) and bam – your troubles are now suddenly top priority. That is exactly what the Bangalore Apartments’ Federation (BAF) – which represents the interests of apartment associations across– has realised.has just launched a voting campaign – ‘Arise! Awake! Residents of Apartments inof Bengaluru’ or AARAMB – that aims to create awareness among apartment residents about the importance of voting. This, to ensure that apartment dwellers, who were hitherto considered apathetic to civic governance, change that attitude and come to be seen as citizens who matter in the upcoming assembly elections. The idea is to initiate mass voting by apartment residents across Bengaluru, says, General Secretary of BAF. It’s a tall ask, given that BAF currently has about 150 apartment associations as registered members representing almost 25,000 apartment units.But the same numbers also mean over 75,000 voters, which the BAF is hoping to leverage as they reach an expected membership strength of 500 apartment associations by March, comprising more than 2 lakh voters.BAF has also partnered with B.PAC (Bangalore Political Action Committee) which has been running a 1 Million New Votes Campaign in Bangalore. “This is a structured campaign being run by BAF, with a champion in each association driving the initiative forward,” says Narasimhan. Social media is playing an important role in the campaign, because as KV Prasanna, Vice President of BAF says, “Social media can play a significant role in elections, especially in urban areas like Bengaluru which has a high proportion of tech-savvy population.” The team is using a Telegram group as well as agroup comprising the managing committee members of each member association, who in turn are communicating with all their residents through their respective groups. Ajay Mehrotra, Joint Secretary of BAF, who leads its technology and social media initiatives, says, “Every apartment association has a WhatsApp / Telegram / Google / Facebook group which connects all the residents through a single click. This has become the preferred mode of communication for apartment residents.” As Vikram Rai, Treasurer of BAF says: “Communicating with lakhs of apartment residents is now just two clicks away.”They are buttressing these efforts with an offline campaign comprising banners, posters, pamphlets and door-to-door knowledge sharing.Apartment dwellers in Bengaluru have been facing a number of issues for a while now – the most recent being the demand to installretrospectively where it does not serve any purpose. There are other issues too.R. Balasubramanian, President of BAF says, “Apartments are being threatened with criminal action for letting out even properly treated sewage; are paying 300 per cent higher water tariff compared to individual houses among others. If things go well, it will mean that the political class can no longer afford to ignore us.”