With elections looming, civic apps look to ride on the poll bandwagon

Antaraa Vasudev, founder of Civis, which helps citizens give feedback about policies and legislations, said: "As election nears, there is big spike in understanding of civic tech." The company works with not-for-profit organisations to reach out to citizens. It currently has 1000 citizens and 200 active users on its platform. Civis will come out with its app in July.

According to Vasudev, this spike in interest is thanks to increasing mobile penetration that has resulted in better awareness about civic technology. As technology adoption increases, so does citizens' interest to engage with the administrators and an opportunity to voice their opinion.

While Civis focuses on helping citizens give feedback, NextElection allows users to collectively discuss issues and channel the feedback to authorities and publicly rate them real-time. NextElection app is available in Android.

Another app Neta, which ranks politicians on a real time basis based on voters' feedback, is adding a million users per day since the announcement of election dates. The platform witnessed increased traction since the Pulwama attack.

Neta was first launched in August 2018 and was rolled out initially in Karnataka, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh during State elections. It now covers all constituencies in India.

Pratham Mittal, founder, said the platform has over 20 million voters and 7,800 leaders engaging users on a daily basis. With such a big sample size, Mittal said even political parties are using the platform's data for selecting candidates for different constituencies.

For politicians, a platform like Neta offers insights into the mindset of voters. In addition since the sample size is huge, experts say that the data is a lot more accurate.

Mittal said that based on the company's experience during Karnataka and Rajasthan elections, their results are accurate.

The platform has partnered with five media houses that has also made equity investment in the company. Apart from media, the company has also raised funds from venture capitalists and high net-worth investors. The company has raised funding of Rs 80 crore in total.

While Mittal's venture has received funding from media houses and private investment, funding is a challenge. According to a previous report, Civis depends on grants for sustaining the business while NextElection is exploring ad revenues.