Over the last 91 days, the AAP government at Delhi has reportedly spent around 14.5 Lakh per day only on the advertisement. On the part of the Delhi residents, the question that arises is that the government that came to power by showing off the lean towards honesty is wasting such huge amount of money on things like advertisements.
The Supreme Court has already said that picture of no influential figure can be used for the political advertisements whereas the government of Delhi is spending lakhs on print advertisements. Out of the list of publication houses which received money from the Delhi government Malayali and one Kannada newspaper – popular in Kerala and Karnataka.
When the media questioned this deed, the government justified it by saying that the advertisements were related to public awareness. The Lok Sabha also questioned the government on this. In that reply, it admitted that the government had spent Rs. 5 crore for publicizing the two rounds of the odd-even scheme, implemented for 15 days each in January and April.
The RTI against the government was filed against advocate Aman Panwar of the Congress party. The Congress party faced severe criticisms for spending 23 crores during the Commonwealth Games in 2010 while Sheila Dixit was the Chief Minister.
As the ads on which the money was spent were outstations, the petition said that the ads were of no use or at least not so important that such huge amount of money was spent on the same.
The Congress Chief of Delhi said, “On one hand we don’t have money to pay to ‘safe karmacharis’ for salaries. On one hand, we don’t have money to pay for pensions. On the other hand, they are spending more than the previous year on their self-publicity.”
