In Chapter 6, I provided summary statistics pertaining to the demographic and educational profile of CAG’s core team members. Here, I provide a methodological note on how this information was compiled.

Between mid-2013 and mid-2014, CAG’s official website provided brief biographical details of its team members. While the website was subsequently taken down after the 2014 general election, I was able to access this information through the Wayback Machine. Using multiple captures of the webpage provided by the Wayback Machine across different dates, I was able to compile a list of 93 core team members. The special focus given to these individuals on CAG’s official website indicates their relative importance in the organisational affairs along with that of Prashant Kishor under whose leadership they operated. Here are two examples:

As can be noted here, the biographical details found on the website were often quite terse and sometimes had missing information pertaining to key variables of interest. I was able to overcome this limitation by supplementing the information found on the CAG website with the information provided by the same individuals on their LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn is a popular social networking site used for professional networking opportunities and career development. It was possible to correctly identify a core team member’s profile by cross-checking their name, photograph and other available details on LinkedIn with those present on the CAG website. Many of these core team members had publicly declared their affiliations with CAG on their LinkedIn profiles as well, which made it easier to confirm their identity.

Once the right profile was matched, LinkedIn could provide the missing information about an individual’s education profile if this information was missing from the biographical sketches found on the CAG website.