IB's out of the game

Has anyone noticed the absence of government assessments of the elections? In the past, one or the other newspaper would routinely run a story of the Intelligence Bureau's (IB) estimates of the number of seats the incumbent government might win, what the opposition was getting and so on. But in this election, the IB has done no assessment whatsoever. The reason, a top IB operative told Business Standard somewhat mournfully, is: when the prime minister takes no interest in the IB, how can the organisation take the initiative? The last political survey IB did was in 2009. "We're out of that game forever," he said. He added that with political parties also outsourcing such surveys to independent agencies, the job had become "too expensive" to do in any case.