'It was an error of judgement...':Axis My India's Pradeep Gupta says he took UP 'lightly' in exit polls

Axis My India's chief, Pradeep Gupta, attributed an error in judgment to their inaccurate exit polls, admitting that underestimating Uttar Pradesh in the final election phases was a costly mistake, he said in an interview with PTI. Gupta acknowledged diverting resources from UP to Odisha, where their earlier predictions had also faltered. He mentioned the importance of not neglecting any state, especially Uttar Pradesh, in future election analyses.

Axis My India's exit poll forecasted 361-400 seats for the BJP-led alliance in the Lok Sabha elections, including 67 seats from Uttar Pradesh, which has 80 seats in total. However, the final results revealed that the BJP secured 240 seats nationwide, falling short of a majority. Uttar Pradesh, particularly, turned out to be a significant setback for the BJP as they won only 33 seats, contrasting sharply with the exit poll predictions.

Gupta clarified that the issue was not with Axis My India's method of predicting exit polls but with how they deployed 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.

Gupta explained that the key issue was the significant differences in eastern Uttar Pradesh seats. He noted that during the fifth, sixth, and seventh phases of elections, 41 out of 80 seats were contested. Simultaneously, Haryana and Delhi had elections in the same phase, while Punjab and Himachal Pradesh had theirs in the seventh phase. Additionally, Odisha and Jharkhand also held elections during these phases for the first time.

"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," Gupta said.

"In 2019, we had predicted everything correctly. We wanted to see Odisha with extra care this time so there is no lapse which did not happen," he said.

In the past four elections, our predictions for Uttar Pradesh were accurate," Gupta said. "However, this time we did not allocate our top resources to UP during the crucial fifth, sixth, and seventh phases, and that's where I went wrong."

"It was an error of judgement," he said.

The 55-year-old pollster came under scrutiny when opposition parties accused him of intentionally predicting a BJP landslide to manipulate the stock market. Following the release of the exit polls, the market surged to a record high, only to plummet on the day of the election results.

"Thirty-one resources were sent as observers, trainers or coaches to different states, nobody was sent to Uttar Pradesh and this is where we made the mistake. We also sent some senior UP resources to Bengal but due to the political violence, the interview rate there was low and that made the difference," Gupta said.

"The 2024 elections are a learning for us to not take any state lightly, that too states like Uttar Pradesh," he added. For the 2024 elections, Axis My India predicted 361-401 seats for the BJP-led alliance and 131-166 seats for the opposition INDIA bloc in the 543-member Lok Sabha. "Out of 64 crore voters, we spoke to 5.82 lakh voters, which is a representational sample size. We covered 3,607 assembly constituencies, over 22,000 villages. Our on-ground interviews are monitored by a team, there is no possibility of any manipulation or bias," he said.

"All exit poll companies made similar claims this time. We are always different but this time we also predicted like them and that is where we lost the opportunity ... and that is where we went wrong," he added.

Axis My India has been conducting exit polls since 2013, following Gupta's return from Harvard Business School. They boast a track record of accurately predicting 65 out of 69 elections. However, during a recent election, a leaked survey by Axis India midway through the process predicted that the BJP had no prospects of improving its tally in 13 states and might lose seats it previously held.

Gupta dismissed the leaked survey as fake. Yet, when the election results were revealed, they closely mirrored the predictions of that survey, which sparked suspicions among observers.

"There is no way any data can get leaked from my office ... everything is recorded, there is nothing on cloud server, only on internal servers. No mobile phones are allowed in office, no computer has internet connection ... we are so confident about data, there is no question of leakage," he added.