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By:

Yogesh Kumar Goyal

19 April 2026 at 12:32:19 pm

The Exit Poll Mirage

While exit polls sketch a dramatic map of India’s electoral mood, the line between projection and verdict remains perilously thin. With the ballots across five politically pivotal arenas of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry falling silent until the results are announced on May 4, poll surveyors have filled the vacuum with exit poll numbers that excite, alarm and often mislead. These projections have already begun shaping narratives well before D-Day on May 4. If India’s...

The Exit Poll Mirage

While exit polls sketch a dramatic map of India’s electoral mood, the line between projection and verdict remains perilously thin. With the ballots across five politically pivotal arenas of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry falling silent until the results are announced on May 4, poll surveyors have filled the vacuum with exit poll numbers that excite, alarm and often mislead. These projections have already begun shaping narratives well before D-Day on May 4. If India’s electoral history offers any lesson, it is that exit polls illuminate trends, not truths. Bengal’s Brinkmanship Nowhere is the drama more intense than in West Bengal, arguably the most keenly watched contest among all five arenas. The contest for its 294 seats has long transcended the state’s borders, becoming a proxy for national ambition. Most exit polls now point to a striking possibility of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) majority, in some cases a commanding one. Such an outcome would mark a political earthquake. For decades, Bengal has resisted the BJP’s advances, its politics shaped instead by regional forces - first the Left Front, then Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC). Yet the arithmetic of the polls suggests that the BJP’s campaign built on organisational muscle and the promise of ‘parivartan’ (change) may have finally breached that wall. The TMC, meanwhile, appears to be grappling with anti-incumbency and persistent allegations of corruption. Still, one outlier poll suggests it could yet retain power, a reminder that Bengal’s electorate has a habit of confounding linear predictions. Here, more than anywhere else, the gap between projection and reality may prove widest. Steady Script If Bengal is volatile, the Assam outcome looks fairly settled. Across agencies, there is near unanimity that the BJP-led alliance is poised not just to retain power, but to do so comfortably. With the majority mark at 64 in the 126-member assembly, most estimates place the ruling coalition well above that threshold, in some cases approaching triple digits. The opposition Congress alliance, by contrast, appears stranded far behind. Under Himanta Biswa Sarma, the BJP has fused development rhetoric with a keen sense of identity politics, crafting a coalition that has proved resilient. A third consecutive term would underline the party’s deepening institutional hold over the state. Kerala, by contrast, may be returning to its old rhythm. For decades, the state has alternated power between the Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) with metronomic regularity. The LDF broke that pattern in the last election, securing an unprecedented second term. Exit polls now suggest that experiment may be short-lived. Most projections place the UDF comfortably above the 71-seat majority mark in the 140-member assembly, with the LDF trailing significantly. If borne out, this would reaffirm Kerala’s instinctive resistance to prolonged incumbency. Governance records matter here, but so does a deeply ingrained political culture that treats alternation as a form of accountability. Familiar Duel? Tamil Nadu, long dominated by its Dravidian titans, shows little appetite for disruption as per most exit polls, which place M.K. Stalin’s DMK-led alliance above the halfway mark of 118 in the 234-seat assembly. Yet, some sections have suggested a possible upset could be staged by actor Vijay’s TVK, the wildcard in the Tamil Nadu battle. Most polls, however, are clear that the opposition AIADMK alliance, though competitive, seems unlikely to unseat the incumbent DMK. In Puducherry, the smallest of the five contests, the implications may nonetheless be outsized. Exit polls give the BJP-led alliance a clear majority in the 30-seat assembly, relegating the Congress-led bloc to a distant second. Numerically modest, the result would carry symbolic weight. A victory here would further entrench the BJP’s presence in the south, a region where it has historically struggled to gain ground. For all their allure, exit polls are imperfect instruments. They rest on limited samples, extrapolated across vast and diverse electorates. In a country where millions vote, the opinions of a few thousand can only approximate reality and often fail to capture its nuances. There is also the problem of the ‘silent voter’ - individuals who either conceal their preferences or shift them late. Recent elections have offered ample reminders. In states such as Haryana and Jharkhand, and even in Maharashtra where margins were misjudged, exit polls have erred, and sometimes dramatically sp. Moreover, the modern exit poll is as much a media event as a methodological exercise. Packaged with graphics, debates and breathless commentary, it fills the void between voting and counting with a sense of immediacy that may be more theatrical than analytical. That said, to dismiss them entirely would be too easy. Exit polls do serve a purpose in sketching broad contours, highlighting regional variations and offering clues about voter sentiment. For political parties, they are early signals and act as tentative guides for observers. Taken together, this cycle’s exit polls suggest a broad, if tentative, pattern of the BJP consolidating in the east and north-east, and opposition alliances regaining ground in parts of the south, and continuity prevailing in key states. But patterns are not outcomes and only counted votes confer legitimacy. It is only on May 4 when the sealed electronic voting machines will deliver that clarity. They will determine whether Bengal witnesses a political rupture or a resilient incumbent, whether Assam’s stability holds, whether Kerala’s pendulum swings back, and whether Tamil Nadu stays its course. (The writer is a senior journalist and political analyst. Views personel.)

Committees galore, no action

Kolhapur: Something remarkable has happened to heart care in India over the past two decades. Procedures that once required a patient to travel to a major city — angiography, angioplasty, complex interventions — are now available in district hospitals. The machine that made this possible is the catheterisation laboratory, the Cath Lab, a sophisticated imaging suite that has quietly become the backbone of modern cardiac treatment.


Maharashtra has been expanding this network. That is the good news. The troubling part is what the expansion is costing.


The big manufacturers in this space: Philips, GE HealthCare, Siemens Healthineers; price a quality Cath Lab at roughly Rs 6–8 crore. Bundle in installation, civil works, ancillary equipment, the whole turnkey package, and you are still looking at Rs 10–12 crore by most industry reckonings. So when procurement figures in Maharashtra climb to Rs 25–40 crore for a single unit, the gap demands an explanation.


Two government resolutions from the State's Medical Education Department tell the story bluntly. On January 25, 2024, a Cath Lab was approved at Rs 16.50 crore. Six months later, on July 5, 2024, the same department cleared Rs 39.76 crore on a turnkey basis for a biplane Cath Lab at CPR Hospital in Kolhapur. That is a difference of Rs 23.26 crore.


The Public Health Department has since sanctioned Rs 99.85 crore for Cath Labs in Pune, Kolhapur, Jalna, and Gadchiroli, working out to roughly Rs 24.96 crore apiece.


The Issue

To understand how prices get this far from reality, you have to follow the supply chain. Maharashtra once bought medical equipment through government rate contracts. When irregularities surfaced there, procurement moved to the Haffkine Institute. That arrangement bred its own dissatisfactions, and purchases shifted again, this time to District Planning and Development Council funds.


In the earlier model, manufacturers bid directly. That meant the original company stood behind the warranty, the maintenance, the performance; all of it contractually binding. But as tender prices crept upward, manufacturers grew cautious. They have global pricing norms to protect and reputations to consider. Quietly, many stepped back from tenders where the quoted figures looked hard to justify.


Distributors filled the vacuum. The mechanics are simple: a manufacturer invoices a distributor at a standard rate; the distributor quotes the government at a far higher one. The manufacturer's exposure is limited to what it charged the distributor. The markup in between sits beyond the reach of direct corporate scrutiny. With enough institutional weight on the buying side, public controversy becomes easier to contain.


Inquiry After inquiry

The Cath Lab story would be troubling enough on its own. But it is part of something larger; a pattern of governance failure in Maharashtra's health sector where accountability has become almost theoretical.


The pandemic made this visible to everyone. While people hunted for oxygen cylinders and basic medicines, procurement deals were allegedly being struck at many times the market rate. Legislative uproar followed.


Audit inquiries were commissioned and reportedly confirmed financial irregularities running into crores. And then? Years on, critics point out that not a single clerk was suspended. The officials against whom inquiry reports recorded the most serious findings are said to have been promoted.


At CPR Government Hospital and Rajarshi Shahu Government Medical College in Kolhapur alone, the count of inquiry committees reportedly crosses a hundred. A fire at a trauma care centre allegedly cost patients their lives; an inquiry was ordered and apparently went nowhere. A lift malfunction injured a patient; a committee was formed, accountability never fixed.


The irony

An inquiry into inflated procurement was apparently abandoned after its own chairperson resigned, citing pressure. A clerk allegedly misappropriating fees from paramedical courses was referred to a committee; what followed remains opaque. In at least one case, people who were themselves the subject of ongoing scrutiny were later appointed to chair other committees. Files pile up. Conclusions do not.


Credibility Deficit

Health is not an abstract policy domain. When a hospital lift fails and nobody answers for it, when procurement is inflated and the inquiry dissolves quietly, the consequences fall on patients; people who often have nowhere else to turn.The credibility deficit this creates is real and cumulative. Once officials understand that irregularities carry no personal cost, a culture sets in that is very difficult to reverse.


Maharashtra needs its Cath Labs. That is not the argument. The argument is that spending public money to build health infrastructure, while tolerating opacity in how that money is spent, is not a health policy. it is a contradiction. Restoring trust will take more than the next committee.


(Concludes)

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