Success Factors
Continuing from the future…
A question that is often asked is: What made Nayi Disha succeed? Many political parties in India had failed to grow beyond a state. How did a leaderless entity capture power in less than 500 days since its launch?
There were five factors which helped Nayi Disha: timing, tech, platform, incentives, and constraints.
Timing: Every government has an opportunity to transform, but very few actually do. In India, politicians get into the same rut of welfare and handouts, funded by taxes and economic interventions. As long as there is economic growth, this works well enough to keep people quiet. But the pandemic disrupted business as usual. More than the pandemic it was the arbitrary lockdowns that disproportionately damaged the vast majority of Indians not lucky enough to have good jobs that enabled them to work from home. A future that seemed somewhat bright was dimmed by lack of education, jobs, incomes and economic opportunities. People had despaired of the politicians and their pie-in-the-sky; they wanted something different – something that promised and showed a path to a better future. Nayi Disha and Dhan Vapasi did just that.
Tech: Without digital, it would have been impossible for rapid growth. For Indians in 2022, mobile phones had become a necessity. There was at least one smartphone in almost every family in India. With the world’s cheapest connectivity, digital virality was possible. The design of the Nayi Disha platform hooked early adopters and they then helped spread it. The app was also crafted such that it could work in a peer-to-peer mechanism, without relying on the App Stores (which could potentially be blocked by upset politicians!)
Platform: Nayi Disha was created as a platform, and not yet another political party. It was made to serve the people, not one or two individuals at the top. Notwithstanding the moniker “crypto party”, it was a decentralised platform, where decisions were made by consensus rather than the wishes of a few. It also needed very few decisions: the rules governing its operations were simple and could be explained to others in minutes.
Incentives: Nayi Disha combined the fun of gamification with the power of money. Everyone knew that they would only benefit if others also joined in. Dhan Vapasi would not happen with 1 or 10 or 100 MPs in the next Lok Sabha; they needed a majority. Dhan Vapasi was the greatest empowerment program that could be imagined, and it was built on the simple principle of fairness – every Indian owned a share in the public wealth of India, and deserved to get it back. This combined with the gamification aspects of Nayi Disha created the right competitive spirit to drive adoption and spread.
Constraints: Nayi Disha did not try to do too much. It had a clear single purpose: Swatantra Lok Sabha in the 2024 elections to elect a government for a 5-year term to implement the economic agenda. The focused objective and the limited time span convinced people that they needed to give this initiative an opportunity – because the politicians had singularly failed in the 75 years they had been given to create a prosperous India. Promises repeated year after year, election after election held little excitement in post-pandemic and post-lockdowns India. Change was needed, and Nayi Disha’s clarity of purpose won the day.
And so it was that in May 2024, a new government took office, and its first act was the passage of the Dhan Vapasi Bill – liberating Indians from the clutches of their government and giving them the freedom they needed to create a better life.
