To raise poll funds, AAP urges people to ‘adopt’ constituencies

The Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has decided to involve citizens as stakeholders through its ‘adopt a constituency’ initiative, as part of which common people take up the responsibility of funding the entire campaign.

The Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has decided to involve citizens as stakeholders through its ‘adopt a constituency’ initiative, as part of which common people take up the responsibility of funding the entire campaign.

Of the 70 constituencies across Delhi, the party has put up as many as 21 constituencies — including New Delhi from where Kejriwal has decided to take on Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit — for adoption. These include all constituencies where the candidate may not be able to raise the legally permissible amount of Rs 14 lakh for election campaign.

“We want individuals or a teams to adopt constituencies. This will help establish personal connections between candidates and volunteers, who will need to work for raising the required resources,” said a party leader.

The constituencies selected include New Delhi, Patparganj (party spokesperson Manish Sisodia’s constituency) and Babarpur (party’s national executive committee member Gopal Rai’s constituency).

Donation drive picks up
The party has been able to collect funds in this manner for 15 of these 21 constituency and the efforts were on to mobilise people for the others too.

“Donations received under this scheme includes those from outside India too, including AAP supporters from the United States. We review the situation in each constituency and take decisions about how much fund to issue to each of these,” a source said.

As reported by HT on Friday, the party has decided to scale up door-to-door campaign, which includes donation collection. The party has devised innovative ways to collect funds for the election campaign.

“Apart from the door-to-door collections, which ranges from amounts as small as Rs 1, Rs 2, Rs 10 and Rs 51 to bigger amounts such as Rs 50,000, we collect money at certain events,” a party official said.

“We have a provision of online donation. People give cheques and drafts. For any and every donation, however, small it may be, we issue a receipt,” he said.