Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s monthly radio broadcast ‘Mann Ki Baat’ was one of his unique attempts to connect with the masses after coming to power in May 2014.
While people listened to the radio occasionally and preferred FM stations, PM Modi brought the focus of the nation back to the national broadcaster ‘All India Radio (AIR)’. ‘Mann ki Baat’ became the talk of the town with its monthly broadcast. Scores of people would wait in anticipation of the program to hear what PM Modi will talk about that month.
It wasn’t just an expense for the national broadcaster, as they also started earning revenues from it. It has now come to light that the program fetched almost 5 times in revenue than the amount spent on advertising and promotions for the show.
This information was revealed in two RTI queries filed by activist Vivek Pandey. He received a response, from the Office of the Additional Director General about the year-on-year gross revenue generated by Mann ki Baat from 2014 to October 2022.
#RTI has revealed that PM Narendra Modi’s #MannKiBaat program earned more revenue than the total expenditure incurred so far in promoting it. In which from 2014 to 2022, 5.88 crores were spent on this, whereas 33 crores 16 lakhs revenue has been earned till oct 2022#NarendraModi pic.twitter.com/UPrI6mh1dn
— Vivek pandey (@Vivekpandey21) January 1, 2023
Pandey also received another RTI response about the expenditure on promotions and advertising of Mann ki Baat from the Central Bureau of Communication (CBC) of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting.
While speaking to OpIndia, Vivek Pandey informed that he filed the RTI queries after coming across media reports of ‘falling revenues’ of Mann Ki Baat between 2018 and 2021. As such, he wanted to have better clarity of the full picture.
“It was clear that revenues had fallen after the Covid-19 situation arose, but what the RTI reply has now shown is that there was zero, yes ZERO, amount of expenditure in the same duration to promote the Prime Minister’s show,” he emphasised.
Documents received from the RTI reply indeed show that there has been zero expenditure on any kind of promotion in print media, television, radio, and on digital media in the last three years.
Moreover, this expenditure didn’t go down to zero only in the last three years, but there has been no expenditure on display advertisements for ‘Mann Ki Baat’ since FY 2017-18 itself.
There were some minor expenditures on non-display promotion after 2017-18, but that too went down to zero as per the response received by Vivek Pandey to his RTI query.
As a result, ‘Mann Ki Baat’ has now earned 33.16 crores in revenues ever since it started airing, while only around ₹7.29 cores were spent on the promotion. Out of the said amount, only 5.88 crores were spent on display advertising in print.
The bulk of this expenditure was undertaken in the first year of the operation, after which the officials received instructions from the Prime Minister to not spend on the promotion of the program.
PM Modi emphasised that the objective of the exercise was to connect with the masses and revive AIR rather than promote a particular program.
