Taking U.P. lightly cost us badly: Axis My India's Pradeep Gupta on exit polls being wrong

Axis My India chief Pradeep Gupta admits error in judgment for exit polls, shifts resources from UP to Odisha.

Blaming an error of judgment for his exit polls going off the mark, Axis My India chief Pradeep Gupta has said taking Uttar Pradesh lightly in the last three phases of the elections cost it dearly as it shifted its top resources away from the crucial Hindi-heartland state to Odisha that it had got wrong in the earlier polls.

Axis My India's exit poll predicted 361-400 seats for the BJP-led alliance in the Lok Sabha elections, including 67 seats in Uttar Pradesh that sends 80 members to the Lower House of Parliament. But the actual results showed the BJP getting 240 seats and missing the majority mark with Uttar Pradesh proving to be the biggest upset for the party with it winning just 33 seats.

In an interaction with PTI editors at the agency's headquarters in New Delhi, Mr. Gupta said it is not the Axis My India's method of predicting exit polls which went wrong but deployment of resources in crucial states.

"We have a foolproof methodology used for predicting elections ... it was not our method which went wrong. I made a mistake in deployment of my senior resources and took crucial states like Uttar Pradesh lightly. It is said that the route to power in Delhi (Centre) is through UP. This is a lesson to never ignore any state when it comes to exit polls," he said.

"Though the NDA (BJP-led National Democratic Alliance) formed government but there was a huge difference in the number of seats we predicted and the number of seats the BJP actually got. We were proved wrong. Three states where we were badly went wrong were UP, West Bengal and Maharashtra," he said.

Explaining his analysis about where he went wrong, including on deploying resources, Gupta said, "In UP, there was considerable difference in eastern UP seats. Forty-one out of 80 seats went to polls in the fifth, sixth and seventh phases. During the same time, Haryana and Delhi had elections in the same phase, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh in the seventh phase." It also happened for the first time that Odisha and Jharkhand went to polls these phases, he said.

"Generally, elections used to be finished for other states in earlier phases and the last phase used to be for West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In Delhi also the political scenario was that Arvind Kejriwal had just come out of jail before the elections. The impact of the Aam Aadmi Party was also supposed to be in these three states only," Mr. Gupta said.