The group of ministers privy to an internal note on how to publicise Central government schemes and achievements may as well meet again to review it to see how puerile the recommendations sound. To believe any arm of the government is capable of making documentary films on achievements to be aired compulsorily in all movie theatres, which would be interesting enough to hold a captive audience spellbound even for a few minutes, would be the height of optimism.
Creativity in the publicity departments of the government is known to be virtually absent, which means thousands of people will be sniggering at such outdated publicity tactics. Also, a highly evolved cinema audience today would pay even shorter shrift to such gimmicks as documentaries than they would to the jewellery and bathroom ceramics ads they must tolerate before the feature film is screened. Showing anything compulsorily to a modern audience can be most counterproductive.
So shoddy is the view of getting publicity in newspapers through exclusives that the note appears to have been written by a low-grade civil servant. There is nothing more likely to anger the print media than to plant stories in some newspapers as “exclusives”. The bureaucratic thinking is all too obvious in such banal recommendations as “ministers should be present at inauguration of Central schemes”.
Catch a politician not using such a photo-op to associate himself with a scheme that has the backing of the Union government. The one note of reason in the whole paper appears to be to name all schemes after the Prime Minister in a generic honorific so that there is no undue political message.
