utsavmandalउत्सव मंडळ
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India’s Favourite Ganpati — official rules

Organised by utsavmandal.com. Questions: contact us.

1. Free to take part

Voting and entering are free. No purchase, payment or fee is ever needed, and paying anyone cannot get you votes, points or draw entries. Anyone who offers to sell votes is not acting for us.

2. The contests and who is in them

  • Mandals: every published, publicly listed sarvajanik, housing-society or other mandal page on utsavmandal.com is entered automatically. Its team can withdraw it from the dashboard.
  • Home Ganpati: a home page takes part only if its team opts in from the dashboard. Contest lists show its name, city and photo, never an address or a map.
  • Office pages, and listings the mandal itself has not claimed, are not in either contest.

3. Voting

  • One vote per person, per contest, per day (India time), until 25 Sept, 11:59 pm IST.
  • A vote without an account counts 1 point. A vote from an email address proven with a sign-in code counts 5 points. Throwaway email addresses never count as verified.
  • Gmail addresses that differ only by dots or a “+tag” are one person.
  • If you vote without an account and then verify your email the same day, that vote becomes your verified vote. It is not counted twice.

4. Qualifying and winning

  • An entry needs at least 100 votes to qualify. Until then it is not ranked and cannot win.
  • Qualified entries are ranked by points. If two entries have the same points, the one with more verified votes ranks higher. If they are still tied, the one whose Instagram post of the entry has more likes when voting closes ranks higher: the post must be public, tag @utsavmandal_com, and be sent to us from the page’s dashboard before voting closes. We count the likes within 24 hours of the close and keep screenshots. If they are still tied, the one that reached its points first ranks higher.
  • Posting on Instagram is never needed to take part or to win. An entry without a post counts as 0 likes in a tie.
  • Mandal prizes: ₹10,000, ₹7,500, ₹5,000. Home Ganpati prizes: ₹5,000, ₹3,000, ₹2,000. Paid by UPI to the winning mandal’s organisers.

5. The voter draw

  • 10 winners of ₹1,000 each, plus 5 reserves, drawn after voting closes.
  • Each verified vote is one entry, so voting every day in both contests gives the most entries. Entries cannot be bought.
  • How it is made fair, step by step:
    1. Before voting closed, the database picked a random 256-bit number (the seed) and published only its SHA-256 fingerprint.
    2. Every voter who verified their email is one entrant with one entry per verified vote. Test addresses and utsavmandal staff are left out.
    3. Each entrant has a public code: the first 12 characters of the SHA-256 of their voter key.
    4. For each code, u = (the first 52 bits of HMAC-SHA256(key = seed, message = code) + 0.5) ÷ 2^52, and the draw key = −ln(u) ÷ entries. The smallest keys win; the next are reserves.
    5. After the draw the seed is published with the full entry list, so anyone can check that SHA-256(seed) is the fingerprint and re-run the order.
  • The fingerprint of the seed is published here before voting closes.

6. Winners and payment

  • Winners must be 18 or over and live in India, and must claim within 14 days by giving their name and UPI ID.
  • An unclaimed draw prize passes to the next reserve.
  • Every prize is ₹10,000 or less, so no tax is deducted at source. Winners are responsible for their own income tax.
  • utsavmandal.com staff cannot win.

7. Fair play

We may remove votes we reasonably believe were automated, bought, or cast with fake or throwaway accounts, and may disqualify an entry or a voter who tries to rig the result. Results are published after a review of at least 24 hours.

8. Your data

For a vote we keep which page it was for, the day, and one-way fingerprints (hashes) of your network and your browser, used only to catch rigging. We never store your IP address itself. For a verified vote we also keep your email address. The network and browser fingerprints are erased once the results are final. See our privacy policy.

9. Changes

If we must change a rule, we will say so on this page and on /vote. A change will never take away votes already cast.

Changed on 15 September 2026: a tie on points is now broken by verified votes, then by Instagram likes on the entry’s post (§4), then by who reached their points first. No vote or point changed.

10. Meta, Facebook and Instagram

This contest is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Meta, Facebook or Instagram. Everyone who takes part releases Meta from any liability connected with it. Questions about the contest go to us, not to Meta: see contact.