There may be two years left for the general elections but the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is already planning a Rs 550-crore print advertising blitz for its flagship programmes like Bharat Nirman, Sarva Shikhsha Abhiyan and Prarambhik Shikhsha Kosh for this financial year.
This budget is more than five times the Rs 100 crore the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government spent on its 2004 “India Shining” campaign and accounts for about 8 per cent of the total advertising spend by the corporate sector on the print media last year.
The publicity campaign will be created by the Directorate of Advertising & Visual Publicity (DAVP) under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B).
Ads? For whom? Why? To win elections? To replace reality with images?
Reminds me of a passage from Milan Kundera's Immortality.
Communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, they felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality.
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