Axis My India will not release its West Bengal exit poll data, founder Pradeep Gupta told NDTV on Thursday.
Gupta said that an extraordinary proportion of voters had refused to speak to interviewers, rendering the sample too thin and unrepresentative to publish any honest seat projection.
Though several pollsters have released exit poll projections for West bengal, Gupta explained the agency's unusual decision in direct terms.
"When we tried to talk after the first phase, about 60-70 per cent of the people had their lips sealed. They were not even ready to say yes or no," he said. The agency, which relies on face-to-face interviews as its primary methodology, found that voter reluctance was so widespread that it could not build a dataset it stood behind.
"So, as long as our sample is not representative, on the basis of a 20-30 per cent sample, we do not believe it is right to predict any number," Gupta told the channel.
"I don't have any opinion, because when no one is speaking, my boundaries are cut short," Gupta said.
"It is my habit to try my best. We have tried and sweated it out for all these days, and we have been sweating it out for so long. It would be a matter of disappointment for us too if we couldn't predict it, after all the effort and sweat we've been putting in."
The absence of Axis My India's numbers is particularly consequential because West Bengal is already the most bitterly divided state in this year's poll of polls.
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Other agencies predictions contradict each other almost entirely. Janmat puts the Trinamool Congress (TMC) at 195–205 seats while Praja Poll gives the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 178–208, a chasm that reflects not just methodological differences but the fundamental opacity of the Bengali electorate.
Results for all 294 West Bengal assembly seats will be declared on May 4.
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