The Jharkhand unit of the Congress decided to accelerate its ongoing membership drive by adopting digital enrolment process.

“We had already launched and been working on a membership drive and now want to give it a momentum by adopting digital enrolment process,” informed state Congress president Rajesh Thakur, adding they planned to increase the number of party members to 15 lakh in the state.

A virtual meeting was held for the purpose on Tuesday when K. Raju, the party’s national in-charge of digital membership drive briefed Jharkhand workers in presence of the state in-charge R.P.N. Singh, on how to go about it, he further informed, adding the meeting was attended by the party’s state functionaries and district presidents.

A specific membership enrolment app would have to be downloaded on android phones from Google play store for the purpose, Thakur explained the process, adding details of the new members including their voter cards, phone numbers and photos would be uploaded there.

“The new members would also be issued a party ID each,” the state Congress chief informed, adding that would be, however, be done in or after April as the digital membership drive would continue for two months till March.

Chief enrollers would also be engaged at booth, block and district levels who would supervise the work at their respective areas. “The enrollers would be trained shortly so that the digital membership drive can begin in early February,” Thakur informed.

They planned to enrol new members by visiting every house in rural areas as that would help them build personal contacts and also enrol maximum members from a particular family, he said.

“But it’s a new system and it has both advantage and problem,” he commented, explaining the advantage was they would have a detailed database of the members while poor internet mobile network in many rural pockets would pose a problem.

They would address the network issues by continuing with the traditional method of getting forms filled up by willing members in such areas and later upload the details on database, he further informed.

The party workers had already distributed nearly six lakh membership forms and would pursue those for enrolling new members in remote areas, Thakur added.

“We have nearly 4.52 lakh members in the state at present and want to increase the number to 15 lakh through the ongoing drive,” Thakur replied when asked and added they would consider it an achievement even if the membership strength goes up to above 10 lakh.

The Congress had won 16 seats in the 2019 Assembly elections and its strength went up to 18 in the 81-member state assembly after two more MLAs joined the party later.

“Every party wants to grow stronger,” Thakur replied when asked if they focused on membership drive with an aim to grab more seats in the next election.