NDA slips, 272 doesn’t look like a cakewalk

The latest national projections (based on the exit poll for the first phase, an opinion poll carried out between April 8 and 14 for the second phase; and a mid-March opinion poll for the last two phases) indicate 255-275 tally for the NDA, 175-195 for the Congress and its allies.

In the first phase of polls in UP on Monday, where 32 seats will be decided, there is a marginal improvement projected for the Congress, from three to four while the BJP stays at 13.

The NDA has done well in Karnataka in the first phase of the elections and is expected to do well next week as well—but not as well as in the first phase.

The NDA is expected to get 19 out of the 28 seats in Karnataka while the Congress may slip from 18 to 7.

The biggest loss to the NDA so far is the loss of its hold on Andhra Pradesh. While the Congress and its allies are expected to take their tally from five to 24 (out of 42), the TDP-BJP combine is likely to slip to 17 from 36.

In Maharashtra, the BJP-Shiv Sena did very well last time because the Congress and the NCP fought separately. Although there is an anti-incumbency swing against the state government in Maharashtra, the Congress, NCP continue to hold on to their 1999 tally of seats because they are united this time.

While the Congress-NCP combine is expected to get 20 seats, the Sena-BJP are projected to get 27, one less than their ’99 tally.

In Bihar and Jharkhand, too, there is a loss to the NDA in relation to the 1999 figures. In Bihar (where 28 seats go to polls in the first two phases), the NDA may get 13 while the RJD and allies may move up to 13 from just six last time.

In Jharkhand, the Congress and its allies are projected to improve their tally from three to six.

The battle now is really on and the NDA needs to do really well in the next two rounds of polling if it is to cross the half-way mark.

METHODOLOGY: The Indian Express and New Delhi Television (NDTV) have jointly commissioned A C Nielsen, a leading market research agency, to conduct fieldwork for aseries of opinion and exit polls to gauge the voting intentions of the electorate as well to seek their views on a range of subjects and personalities.

Nine large states went to the polls in Phase I on April 20. Of those, nine, polling covered all the seats in two states, namely Gujarat and Chhattisgarh. In the other seven, voting is being conducted in two phases, with the Phase II voting to be held on next Monday, April 26.

The national projection in this report is based on a three-fold aggregation. The projections for Phase 1 are based on exit polls, while those for Phase 2 are computed from the results of opinion polls.

The first 32 out of 80 constituencies in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in the union, vote on April 24. Thus, there is no exit poll in Uttar Pradesh and the findings are based entirely on opinion polls.

But some words of caution. All polls are subject to margins of error. The sampling error in this poll differs across the different states, with the highest range of error not exceeding 3 per cent.

In the opinion poll, a total of 55 Lok Sabha constituencies were covered, while in the exit poll, 60 Lok Sabha constituencies were polled. In the first phase of elections, 142 seats went to the polls, while in the second phase on Monday, April 26, another 137 seats will be going to the polls.