So much for Nandan Nilekani’s big data campaign

I got a call a couple of hours back on my landline. The wife picked and was asked to transfer the call to me. When she mentioned that I was busy she was asked about what we think of Nandan Nilekani and whether we are considering voting for him. She told them that we are registered to vote in Bangalore North and hence our opinion of Nilekani doesn’t matter.

I don’t know how the Nilekani campaign team got hold of our phone number. Even if they got from some database I don’t know how they assumed we are registered to vote in Bangalore South. For ours is a bsnl landline and bsnl landlines in Bangalore have a definite pattern that most people in Bangalore are aware of.

Back before 2002 or so when landline numbers in Bangalore got their eighth digit (a leading two) the leading digit of a Bangalore number gave away the broad area.

Numbers in South Bangalore started with 6. A leading 2 meant the number was from the government office dominated areas. A leading 5 was for mg road and the north and east of the city (he cantonment area, indiranagar, koramangala etc) and a leading 3 meant it was a northwest bangalore (malleswaram to vijayanagar) number. 8 was reserved for the outskirts.

Now while Bangalore has expanded significantly these patterns are broadly in place. All you need to do to know where a number is located is to look at the second digit – a 3 there still refers to the north and west sides of the city.

Among the areas of Bangalore that make up Nilekani’s constituency the only one that has a second digit of 3 is vijayanagar (and surrounding areas including the govindrajnagar constituency). From that perspective the likelihood of a number with second digit 2 being in Nilekani’s constituency is really low. Clearly their supposed big data algorithm hasn’t picked that!!

Forget just the second digit – look further down the number. It is public information that 2352 is one of the codes of the Rajajinagar telephone exchange, and all numbers covered by that exchange lie in either bangalore north or Central!!

I wasn’t particularly convinced about Nilekani’s use of big data in the first place – it seemed like the usual media hype – now I think that while his campaign team does use data their use of it is not particularly good. The case that the team in charge of the data analysis for Nilekani lacks any domain knowledge of the city.