Friday, August 10, 2012

First among equals

Modi has been voted the best in all categories. Be it electricity, roads, healthcare, primary education, transport, communications, the situation in Gujarat seems only to be improving. But Modi’s road to victory has a few significant potholes. Only 6% of voters in Gujarat are satisfied with the government’s action to control corruption in civil services. Gujarat’s scores in the parameters of law and order and social and communal harmony is also abysmal.

Raman Singh’s popularity is noteworthy, considering he rules a state which is small and plagued by Maoist violence. People seem to be largely satisfied with his government''s work. His state takes the second position in all the categories among the five best small states. Equally remarkable is Orissa''s Naveen Patnaik who has garnered the second position in terms of net satisfaction ratings with the chief minister but his state is in the fifth position in terms of governance among five large states and lowest in the overall quality of life.

METHODOLOGY

This is one of the most exhaustive and comprehensive surveys done to rate the performance of state governments and chief ministers by their own voters. In all, 26,432 citizens and voters were selected through random sampling. The number of voters selected for each state was proportional to the number of Lok Sabha and Assembly seats. Rural and urban voters were selected on the basis of population in the region. Like the sample from Gujarat has proportionately more urban voters than the sample from Orissa. Each ‘voter’ was given a questionnaire to fill up. Team C-Voter identified 15 parameters on which the citizen voter was required to rate the government and the CM. The answer options were standard-ranging from much improved to remains the same to far worse. Positive responses on each parameter were aggregated and a final average performance measurement was done accordingly. It is important to note here that the ‘performance’ of the state government and CM is based entirely on the perception of the individual voter whose expectations differ. from state to state. Hence, Bihar scores over Karnataka in terms of voter perceptions for the parameter public transport. One interesting and exclusive aspect of the survey is a question asked to voters to rate the best CM outside their own state. It has thrown up interesting results! This is an ongoing survey and TSI, along with C-Voter will be conducting them on a quarterly basis and exclusively share the results with readers.


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