UPA's media blitz eclipses NDA's India Shining tab

The UPA’s Bharat Nirman and the NDA’s unsuccessful India Shining campaign have quite a bit in common -- both tried to take credit for developing India and both involved a media blitzkrieg, but the similarities end when it comes to costs.

Updated on: Feb 19, 2014, 08:39:02 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The UPA’s Bharat Nirman and the NDA’s unsuccessful India Shining campaign have quite a bit in common -- both tried to take credit for developing India and both involved a media blitzkrieg, but the similarities end when it comes to costs.

The UPA will end up spending nearly Rs 450 crore on its campaign — stretching over two years — more than double the Rs 200 crore the NDA spent on India Shining.

Government sources attributed the cost to the doubling of advertising rates in the last decade, across all media formats. “The media space has also expanded exponentially,” an official explained.

Social networking sites have become a key venue for parties to garner votes and the UPA’s Bharat Nirman has extensively used social media for outreach programs coupled with actual outdoor programs in rural India.

A senior government official said the campaign cost was not exorbitant considering that the UPA spent over Rs 3,50,000 crore on welfare measures in 2013-14. “Spending less than 1% of that on outreach programs is justified as it helps in informing people about the schemes meant for their welfare,” the official said.

UPA ministers Anand Sharma, Kapil Sibal and Jairam Ramesh had raised the issue of the government losing the “perception” battle with the BJP and AAP. The UPA and its media managers felt that a more aggressive campaign was needed in light of the relentless accusations of corruption and underachievement by the BJP’s PM candidate Narenda Modi and AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal.

After a drubbing in the five assembly polls last year, the UPA re-jigged Bharat Nirman to showcase the development carried out in UPA’s 10-year rule.

An example of it was an audio visual campaign on television and radio stations showing a person recalling clogged roads, limited banking services and a non-existent airport ten years ago with the present day infrastructure.

Another radio advertisement had a person yelling at his friend living abroad not knowing how much an Indian city had changed in the last ten years. None of the advertisements mentions the UPA government.

The latest basket of UPA advertisements are striking similar to NDA’s India Shining campaign although Information and Broadcasting Manish Tewari refused to draw the analogy.

“We are definitely not planning a Shining India type of campaign... the story of UPA is based on evidence and statistics,” he had told Hindustan Times when the second part of Bharat Nirman campaign was launched in August 2013. “The idea is to strike a balance between what is necessary information and what would not be an overkill.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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