Bengaluru: Union Information Minister Venkaiah Naidu has called for the need to improve communication between the government and the people and highlighted the role played by public relation officers.
After inaugurating All India Public Communicators Workshop here on Friday, he said, “There is a huge responsibility on public relations officers to provide credible information from the government to public. Only with the help of public relations officers people will know about government schemes and programmes. They play a crucial role in making a government's scheme a success.”
He pointed out that a huge amount of money was being spent for the propaganda activities. Mr Naidu said, “Since 2004, both the central and state governments have spent crores together for propaganda activities. Central government alone has spent Rs 6,000 crore, of which Rs 3,295 crore were spent for propaganda via print media, while Rs 2,290 crore were spent for electronic media and Rs 448 crore for outdoor propaganda activities.”
Figures say that there are over 1.12 lakh periodicals, of which only 12 thousand are active and few get printed only when they get advertisements. In Lucknow alone, 65 periodicals are operating on this basis. In the absence of a proper agency to monitor them and in order to get a clear picture on the number of periodicals, we are planning to get information from the printing presses and put a break to inactive periodicals, Mr Naidu said.
He further lamented that in periodicals prominence was not given to development, while importance was being given to accidents and stressed that information should not be published without confirmation. The Minister pointed out that there was an increase in the dependence on social media, which has increased the speed of communication. He requested the public relations officers to utilize social media for effective communication.
