Retired Professor Offers Rs 1 Cr Reward for Accurate Election Prediction
Bhopal: A retired professor of government-run Devi Ahilya Bai University in Indore in Madhya Pradesh on Sunday announced a reward of Rs one crore to the person who can predict correctly the exact number of seats the political parties would win in the ensuing Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand.
Former professor of quantitative techniques and statistics department of the university Dr P N Mishra announced the reward of a hefty amount to challenge the ‘soothsayers and different television news channels and print media’ to prove that their ‘psephological methodologies adopted to predict poll outcomes are scientific’.
Mr Mishra said that anybody, whether visual or print media or even the soothsayers, are welcome to accept the challenge and win the prize money by correctly predicting the ‘seat-wise’ results of the Assembly polls in the two states.
“But they can join the race for the reward with a rider that those who failed to predict correctly must apologize publicly”, he told this newspaper.
The retired professor said that some people, particularly the ‘so called’ astrologers and black magicians, are seen spreading superstitions in the society by making poll predictions without any scientific basis.
He even challenged the media organizations which predict poll outcomes to prove that their methodology is scientific.
“I am a professor of quantitative techniques and statistics and I know very well how to analyze samples to reach a conclusion scientifically. How can the media organizations, whether visual or print, predict, by taking hardly 1,000 or 2,000 samples of such a vast base of electorates”, he said.