Bharat Nirman to India Shining: Why it needs to stop

What costs over Rs 100 crore, tells you things that you probably already know and features too many smiling faces? Invariably a government advertisement campaign talking about a scheme it has already advertised before.

The latest in the big government advertisement campaigns is the new Bharat Nirman campaign which features people talking about IITs, roads, metro railways, Right to Information Act and other achievements of the government and will run through a cool Rs 35 crore in 15 days.

Featuring the voices of Shaan and Sunidhi Chauhan crooning Meelon hum aagaye, meelon hume jaana hai (We’ve come a long way, a long way we’ll go)" and directed by Pradip Sarkar the ads alone reportedly cost Rs 16 crore to produce. Expectedly all the advertisements end with beatific images of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi.

After the initial advertising blitz will come some “calibration” to the public response after which the ministry is expected to run through approximately another Rs 180 crore in order to showcase the government’s achievements, reports India Today . And this, apart from the money already spent on tom-tomming the various schemes through television and radio spots before it got into election mode.

The good news is that the campaign will end by February 2014 if the government lasts till then. Earlier if it doesn’t.

However, Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari claims this is no election campaign and merely highlights the achievements of the UPA government over the last nine years. And he definitely doesn’t see any similarities with the National Democratic Alliance’s ‘India Shining’ campaign in 2004.

“India Shining was hype, hoopla and spin. Our campaign is different. Bharat Nirman is not a poll campaign, it tells the India story of the past nine years,” Tewari told CNN-IBN today . (see the entire interview above)

“We are not claiming to have solved all the problems, ours is an understated campaign. We have put facts in public space, let’s leave it to people’s wisdom,” he said.

The minister is understandably not keen on the comparison with the India Shining campaign - perhaps the most derided political campaign in  India’s politics - which cost the taxpayer a cool Rs 150 crore in a span of 120 days. However, even the agency that developed it claimed it was just a campaign that told people about the India story and never encouraged people to choose whom to vote for.

“Well, for one, the campaign wasn’t political. The sentiment of India Shining still holds true, as the calibre of India to become a super power still doesn’t diminish.  Now whether that’s under the Congress Party or the BJP-led NDA, it doesn’t matter,” Prathap Suthan, national creative director Grey Worldwide, the agency that developed the campaign told Economic Times at the time.

Unnamed sources are also quoted as saying that had the NDA come to power they had an ‘India Accelerating’ campaign that never saw the light of day. Thankfully.

Dipping into public funds for campaigns that further little beyond political aspirations is nothing new to Indian politics. Done by state governments and national governments it isn’t even uncommon for state governments to arm twist media organisations that don’t toe their line.

The Election Commission refuses to involve itself since the campaigns are run before the moral code of conduct comes into place. Perhaps it is time the commission looks at differentiating between surrogate political advertising and information campaigns, especially when the final bill is borne by the public exchequer.