Overseas, but not overlooking

Prantik Majumdar, an Indian living in Singapore, believes that the NRI community should be involved in the role of improving the society through political and financial means. Keeping this in mind, he started a Facebook application to allow NRIs cast their vote virtually and plans to show the active participation of NRIs to the Indian government

Youth of our country seem to reinforce faith in humanity. If one observes the ‘career-graph’ of all these brilliant, ambitious, career-oriented youngsters, one can see they start off their career with a bang, pumping the fresh blood and thoughts into ‘old’ systems and pep up the production. After a few years of toil and basking in the success, new thoughts stem either from contentment or luxuries do not hold the charm anymore. The time’s ripe for them to conceive an idea born out of a social-consciousness, ‘what can I give back to the society?’

Prantik Majumdar, a young responsible NRI, took to a new idea the NRI Voting App which was a welcome move by many NRIs who’d like to exercise their fundamental right to vote.

Elaborating the impetus behind his brainchild Prantik (in an online interview from Singapore) says, “As the election season in India began heating up, many of us ‘arm-chair critics’ in Singapore began debating about the political environment in India, the issues that would define these ongoing elections and marketing strategies utilised by the different political parties. Amidst the heated debates, we realised that despite what we felt or talked about, we NRIs in Singapore would not be able to exercise our fundamentals rights to vote, since most of us would not be able to be physically present in our respective constituencies on polling day due to our work commitments. This got us thinking about the pertinent issue of NRI Voting and I began digging deeper into the subject.”

After a couple of hours of Google searches, Prantik realised that the Indian diaspora is the second largest in the world after that of China and constitutes about 10 per cent of the global immigrant population and is 25 million strong. For him, it was interesting to uncover that contrary to popular belief, Saudi Arabia & UAE hosted the most number of NRIs and not the USA. What fascinated him more was that Indian NRIs contributed US$71 billion in remittances in 2013, that is about 17 per cent of the total global remittance made in that year and that accounted for approximately 16 per cent of the nation's capital accounts earning.

Despite these facts, it was saddening for him to learn that the Elections Commission was not going to allow NRIs to vote from their respective countries of residence. “Instead of debating about it and waiting for the Government of India (GoI) to change its stance on this matter one fine day, a friend of mine, Rahul Rajeev (a fellow alumni from my alma mater NUS) and I decided to protest through some ‘virtual’ action - we decided to create a simple Facebook application that would allow NRIs to cast their ‘virtual vote’ and express themselves,” he says. You could check out the app here: https://apps.facebook.com/nri_voting/

“Within three days of launching the app, we managed to secure over 900 odd NRI fans on the page who have been actively participating in this virtual voting exercise and that is an encouraging indication of their interesting to participate in this "dance of democracy",” Prantik informs.

After completing his undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from National University of Singapore, Prantik served the Singapore government for about three years in a government agency called International Enterprise Singapore (IE Singapore), under the Ministry of Trade & Industry, with the mandate of helping local companies internationalise.

According to Prantik, it is vital that India works closely with the NRI community to further improve global trade R&D as well as seek their active participation in improving the society through political and financial means. “With this vision in mind, we plan to take the results of this NRI Voting App to the Government of India (GoI) through various Indian High Commissions and other relevant statutory bodies to push for the cause of NRI Voting.”

Whilst they know this is a small step, but the young ones are fairly confident that in the digital age such an exercise would be appreciated and would go on to make an impact. “Hopefully by the next general elections, 25 million of us NRIs could be doing their bit to shape the political environment of India.”