Rs 27 crore spent on publicity in 11 months: Minister
It is significant that the BJP govt was highly critical of the previous Cong regime while accusing them of spending huge money on publicity.
Guwahati: In what has put the BJP government in a spot, the Assam government has incurred an expenditure of Rs 27.23 crore on advertisements during 11 months of 2017-18 fiscal.
It is significant that the BJP government was highly critical of the previous Congress regime while accusing them of spending huge money on publicity. In fact, CM’s vigilance cell was probing one of the alleged advertisement scams in which a director of the information and public relation department has already been arrested.
In a written reply to a question of AGP MLA Pabindra Deka, Assam minister on Monday inform-ed the state Assembly that the government’s total expenditure for advertisements stood at Rs 27,22,79,761 from April 2017 to February this year.
Reply on behalf of Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal, who holds the information and public relation department, irrigation minister Ranjit Dutta said that out of the total expenditure, Rs 16.79 crore had been released, while Rs 10.44 crore were due to various media houses.
In addition to the spending for advertisements in media, the government had also sent a proposal of Rs 1.91 crore to the finance department for putting up hoardings at public places.
Giving a break-up of expenditure of the government on media publicity, Mr Dutta said that Rs 21.72 crore had been spent for giving government advertisements to newspapers in the state.
For the electronic media, including TV, radio, SMS services and online, the government gave advertisements worth Rs 95.91 lakh during the first 11 months of the current financial year.
The minister also infor-med that a total of Rs 4.55 crore had been spent for giving advertisements in 14 national newspapers.