In 2016, two years after Narendra Modi took charge as the Prime Minister of the country, the Government of India started a “multi-faceted platform” called e-Sampark which, ostensibly, is “a mechanism to connect the government directly with citizens across India by running mailer, outbound dialing and SMS campaigns.”
The government’s aim in starting this campaign is to “establish proactive communication by digitization of campaigns.” The government claims that e-Sampark, “the multifaceted platform,” which “signifies the essence of digital India,” “facilitates not only seamless communication between the government and citizens, but also maintains a database of contacts of the nodal officers, representatives and citizens.”
The government, which claims to have conducted 3254 campaigns, sent out more than one message daily. A total of 2533.79 crore emails were sent, according to the data on the website. Many who did not subscribe to the platform were added on to the email list; most of them were bombarded with emails on a daily basis. This is a classic case of spamming. However, the government does not think so. A top government official said, “Not more than one mailer is sent out daily. Our analysis shows the click rate on government e-mails – that is the number of senders opening a mail and reading it or embedded links – is almost 4% compared to industry standard of 1% on emailers from private companies. That shows people are interested to know what the government is doing. We are not spamming anyone…the e-mails anyways have an option to unsubscribe.”
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