New Delhi:
On the western edge of Delhi, in Matiala constituency, Gulab Singh Yadav attempts to lend a personal touch as he goes door to door.
Yadav is the AAP candidate from this outer Delhi constituency. The challenge appears immense: Matiala is one of Delhi's biggest constituencies with the high rises of Dwarka to the east, villages and the rural hinterland of Haryana, which it borders, to the west.
Gulab Yadav's only backing appears to be a small, but boisterous handful of volunteers.
Like so many of the AAP's recent recruits, Gulab lives outside his constituency, and is a political novice.
He used to a run a mithai shop in Gurgaon, till he became enamoured of the Anna Hazare movement which spawned the Aam Admi Party.
He says AAP founder Arvind Kejriwal came to his area and shortlisted candidates, of which he was finally chosen.
On the face of it, seems like a David vs Goliath battle. The sitting Congress MLA Sumesh Shokeen, belongs to the powerful Jat community, influential in Matiala. His clan has a monopoly over the local real estate market.
But in the unauthorised settlements of Matiala, with its open sewers, piles of garbage, and a perennial crisis of water, there is anger against Shokeen, who they say has done nothing.
This is a charge denied by Shokeen. He says when he was elected an MLA, no work had ever been done in any of these unauthorised colonies but he brought roads, sewers, pipelines to about 90 of the 101 colonies.
And yet, its isn't entirely clear whether AAP's message of change has managed to reach every corner of this sprawling constituency as we found out when we spoke to residents, many of whom had not even heard about the party, or said they may vote for the BJP.
We asked Arvind Kejriwal whether this is a problem for the party: a strong undercurrent of public support, but a weak roster of candidates.
A majority of the candidates are first timers with little or no experience of public life.
But Kejriwal says this is, in fact their USP as they are trying to bring fresh energy and ideas to the table. "For the first time honest candidates are being talked about in politics", he adds.
But there is a contradiction at play. On radio, Arvind Kejriwal promises voters clean candidates.
But we counted at least 10 candidates who came from either Congress or the BJP, and another four from political background.
Kejriwal says those are honest individuals who were being stifled in their political parties.
We also ask him why there are only six-seven women in the AAP's list of 70 candidates, a figure as small as major political parties.
He concedes that is a problem, but that they had no choice. He says they will rectify it next time.
Up until it declared its candidates, the AAP's internal surveys echoed by the results of independent opinion polls showed a steadily increasing popularity. Its own poll, conducted by Yogendra Yadav in September found that they led in 33 of Delhi's 70 seats.
Professor Yadav agrees that their "campaign strategy and politics have to be less candidate dependent. A political party gets three kinds of votes. Its gets vote which come from party itself which is usually its biggest chunk. Then there are votes which a candidate's personality brings and then there votes from caste community and social group of candidate. Now in our case we would have to depend largely on first."
What the party may lack in terms of a well-oiled political machine needed to fight elections, it gains in terms of a groundswell of popular support, visible in the party's new headquarters: a rent-free house in Central Delhi, donated by a well-wisher and is staffed and run entirely by enthusiastic volunteers.
As volunteers pour in, so does the money through online, on the party's fundraising portal, as well as offline - through cheques - several of which came in on the day we visited. Pankaj Gupta, National Secretary and in charge of Fundraising tells us that they have received Rs 13.5 crores from India and Rs 6 crore from abroad.
He says they only need 20 crores to fight the entire elections, and they have already crossed their target.
But these funds are now being questioned by political parties, seen as an indication that while the Congress and BJP may claim not be worried about their electoral impact, they are worried about the AAP's attempts to change the rules of the game.
The government cited election laws which prohibit political parties from receiving funds from foreign sources.
But Pankaj Gupta, who manages AAP's funding portal explains that as per the Foreign Contributions Act, "Contributions made by a citizen of India living in another country (i.e. Non-Resident Indian), from his personal savings, through the normal banking channels, is not treated as foreign contribution".
The hypocrisy of the questioning of AAP by the national parties are lost on no one. In its tax filings of 2010-2011, the Congress showed contributions of Rs. 307 crores, of which Rs 247 crores came from the "sale of coupons". The BJP earned Rs 168 crore, of which Rs 124 crore came from "voluntary contributions".
Attempts by us in the past to get answers from these national parties about their opaque sources of funds drew a blank.
The government's questioning of their funds has an unintended consequence for the AAP: the next 24 hours saw the number of contributions shoot up by almost double.
But while there's little to fault, the AAP's attempts for cleaner election practises, there is a nagging uncertainty over what they stand for, so far seen less as a provider of solutions, more a perennial critic of the political system.
Their most visible policy intervention - the campaign against Delhi's power tariffs - has not been the most confidence inspiring.
Snapping power connections may have made for powerful photo ops, but they seem to have neglected the complexities of power pricing. Delhi's power rates did jump abruptly by 21% in 2011, followed by subsequent smaller hikes in 2012 and 2013. But the government claims this was long overdue, a result of rising costs at which they purchase power.
Even with the hike, they claim the cost of power to the bottom tier does not rank higher than other major cities.
For the first 200 units, Delhi charges Rs 2.7 per unit (after a Rs 1.20 subsidy), lower than Hyderabad (Rs 3.8), Bangalore (Rs 3.68) and Patna (Rs 3.1).
But Kejriwal rejects the idea that the rates at which Delhi has purchased power has gone up. He says the government is not prepared to hold public audits at the rates at which power is being bought or sold, and is fooling the people, a charged denied by Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.
In an attempt to inject a degree of factual rigour into the AAP agenda, Yogendra Yadav and his team have done extensive research on all that ails Delhi, the findings of which are to be distilled into the party manifesto.
As he told us, "Lots of people have written about what kind of problems Delhi has and what can be done about it. One obvious thing is that water is the central upper most problem of city. We found that the problem is not the aggregate supply of water. There is enough water in the city on the paper but problem is that distribution is extremely uneven. The Delhi Jal Board can't tell you that how much water they receive, treat and how much they release in which zone. They can't even tell you that how much water has been released to Saket. That in Delhi still one third of houses don't have water supply."
Dikshit admits that water is a problem undoubtedly but AAP's figures are wrong. She says, "I would say that at least 80-90 per cent people do get water. I do not say pipe water but everybody gets water from tankers or whatever way. Please remember we are catering to a population which keeps increasing by half a million ever year and it is not so easy. But we are doing it and I hope that in our next term water will not be a problem."
The AAP claims they are not just pointing fingers, but evolving solutions as explained by Yadav, "First of all, making the system transparent which is simple. Let's say audit of how much untreated water we get, how much is treated, how much is supplied to which area? The idea is to make it public on a daily basis. We need to demolish the tanker mafia and the reason why a locality like Sangam Vihar locality not get water is due to the local politician's vested interest so the borewells there are never done. Also to look at local solutions and try to get water to reach through the pipes and lastly acknowledge honestly that the city needs learn recycling, needs to learn water harvesting."
Both Sheila Dikshit and the BJP's Dr Harshvardhan claim that despite the AAP's efforts at a more participative politics, their campaign is having no impact on the ground.
People are confused as to what they stand for, says Dikshit.
And while the AAP clearly has an undercurrent of support, it appears to lacks, at least for now, the strong candidates and the grassroot network of booth-level political managers, needed to convert that groundswell into victory. But this much is clear: they have made the Delhi election the one to watch.