Jobless engineers, MBAs: The hidden army of Indian election ‘consultants’

These ‘politically neutral problem solvers’ do short stints in political campaigns and are valued for their data skills.

“How many tennis balls can fit in a passenger plane?”

Neeraj, a young economics graduate from the premier Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), was given 15 minutes to solve this question during his interview rounds at Nation With Namo (NwN), one of the in-house political consultancies of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

He got the calculation right and joined a small team of graduates from India’s top universities who were dispatched to the eastern state of Tripura to conduct surveys, collect and analyse voter data for elections that were due in February last year.

Their job was to identify who was not voting for the BJP, separate them into demographic cohorts – age, gender, caste, tribe, religion – find a common concern, issue or fear and strategise how to exploit that in the BJP’s favour. And they were to do all this while staying under the radar.

“All of us who go through the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) are good at solving problems,” said Neeraj, who asked for his name to be changed as he is not authorised to speak to the media.

Admission to most of India’s top government-funded engineering, law and management colleges is through all-India exams. Millions of students take these exams, including the JEE for admission to 23 IITs, but only 2-3 percent make it to the premier institutes.

Neeraj is one of few who made it, and is now in the league of hundreds of graduates from India’s top engineering and business schools who have in recent years joined political campaigns, usually for short stints while they wait for lucrative corporate job offers.

An engineering degree from an IIT,