The recent press release by the Department of Information and Public Relations, DIPR, that all government advertisements should be released only through the department as per the state government`™s established advertising rules, is a point worth pondering. Under ideal situation, this would have been indeed a fair proposal for all that is asked is for the different government departments to follow the norms set by the government, and for good reasons. However, the ideal situation which must be the precondition for this practice to be meaningful is what is precisely missing.
The biggest anomaly is that the DIPR has not struck off newspapers and journals which are no longer in publication from its recognized list of publications from the state, so that the total number of publications in the DIPR list must be at least three times as much as those still in actual publication. For very obvious reasons, this is a very deceptive and potentially scandalous situation. This is especially so in the case of government tenders for various contract works. In the past there have been so much charges of what came to be known as `black tenders`, a practice in which tender notices for government contract jobs are released to journals and newspapers no longer in actual circulation so that there are no bidders except the ones in league with concerned officials. For one, this would ensure that certain contract jobs land only in the hands of the intended contractors. For another, it will ensure that the capping of the bids are kept low, generating unwarranted profits. All this is done for a share of the booty between all in this unholy alliance of contractors and government officials.
The equivalent of the DIPR in the Union government is the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity, DAVP, New Delhi. Needless to say this organisation is multiple times bigger and with a budget several thousand times that of the DIPR. Most Central government advertisements for print as well as electronic media are routed through this directorate. Although `black tenders` cannot be feasible here as the same advertisements are released to several thousand publications at a time, it is anybody`™s guess that this organisation too has also become a money spinning den for officials and middlemen. In fact the joke is that the incentives are such that this is the only government in which employees work willingly and enthusiastically even on holidays. The list of DAVP-empanelled newspapers and journals from all over India is close to half a million however a great number of them are nonexistent in the market. The DAVP has a way of weeding out these publications, but they have never been comprehensive. These journals only print few copies by outsourcing the print orders to commercial job-work printers every time there are government advertisements to be printed, therefore they earn with virtually no spending on the usual media overheads of staff salaries, raw materials, office maintenance and news gathering expenses. These leakages are no doubt substantial from the point of view of those operating these shady businesses, but they cannot mean much to the huge advertisement purse of the Government of India, therefore probably considered not worth the effort to plug. They are just minor leakages from the point of view of the government, and not any dark deeds or tools for sinister players to manipulate government projects, as indeed `black tenders`™ are.
This being what it is, we would say the DIPR proposal is very fine for it will standardise the official advertisement market, but it must first ensure the loopholes we pointed out are plugged conclusively. For given the background just sketched, it would remain natural for anybody to presume the proposal is loaded with many shades of vested interests.
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam