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Mission 2019: Modi exhorts BJP MPs to embrace digital and mobile platforms
During his 10-minute-long speech at a breakfast meeting held on Friday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said digital platforms and the mobile mode of communication will assume greater importance in 2019.
After changing the way elections were fought in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already started tutoring BJP MPs on hi-tech ways to campaign for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.
“Digital is the new language and interface, and mobile phones are the new communicators,” a source quoted him as telling a group of BJP MPs from Jharkhand, Odisha, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana on Friday.
During his 10-minute-long speech, Modi said digital platforms and the mobile mode of communication will assume greater importance in 2019. “The beauty of this platform is that it is lively and vibrant,” he reportedly claimed. “You receive immediate responses from a wide range of people. That was not the case with conventional modes of communication.”
The Prime Minister, who is very active on the social media, frequently exhorts cabinet colleagues to promote digital economy and adopt new communication methods. There have been occasions when he broke developing news to the outside world through his Twitter handle. For instance, in 2015, he had tweeted about inviting US president Barak Obama to the country’s Republic Day function.
Modi has 28.5 million followers on Twitter, and his Facebook page boasts of four million likes.
At the breakfast meeting, the Prime Minister asked party MPs to embrace mobile and digital communication in view of the upcoming election. “We should be ready to adopt new digital methods of communication, not just at the party and government level but also as individual MPs,” he said. Communicating in the new age would be impossible unless politicians became mobile and social-media savvy, he added.
Modi also sought feedback on the NDA government’s welfare schemes, and asked the MPs to work towards integrating the rural employment guarantee scheme with another on farm irrigation.
This was the fifth and final round of meetings held between Modi and BJP MPs during the current Parliament session.
