Life is difficult for a street vendor. They sometimes get beaten up by policemen and pay heavy bribes just to set up shop. These are just a couple of daily challenges they have to face in order to earn a living. There is one street vendor though, who faces none of these problems. He is undeterred by the threatening tone of the police. He has the courage to answer them with authority. And impressed with his confidence, policemen also eat golgappas from his stall while on duty. What makes him so different? You see, he has a street vendor’s registration card under the government scheme – which allows street vendors to set up their stalls. And where does this confident bright vendor live? He lives somewhere over the rainbow where the Bharat Nirman ad spots are shot. In this perfect land, everyone is happy and trouble-free. And street vendors sing praises of what the government has done for the welfare of 1 crore street vendors.

In these 55 days, the Bharat Nirman advertisements featuring vendors, farmers and rural land owners have been telecast at a cost of Rs 1 crore, divided among the four channels named. The breakup is given below, as per the RTI response.

Keeping in mind the key characters of the commercials – street vendors, farmers and rural landowners – you cannot help but wonder why the channels chosen for telecast are English channels which one would hazard a guess aren’t at the top of the list of channels being watched by the people they’re featuring. Viewership ratings as provided by Television Audience Measurement (TAM)  act as the criterion for the Bharat Nirman media buyers in choosing which channel to allocate advertisements to. The TAM has a three-step mechanism to determine the reach of a channel. The three filters which are taken into account are – age, gender and socio-economic filters. A TAM representative also told us that the socio-economic filter is determined by the sum of the education qualification and the monthly income of the chief earning member in the family. It is highly unlikely that a street vendor as shown in the Bharat Nirman ad would earn aggregate points to reach the socio-economic group which the English channels cater to.

We spoke to several roadside vendors and asked them if they had ever watched any of these English news channels. Not only had they have not watched English channels, all the people we spoke to told us that they do not watch any news channel. Most of them do not even own a television set.

I did not manage to visit any villages, so I can’t vouch for whether rural landowners are watching these channels or not, but a fair guess would be that they aren’t. As marketing professional and media planner, Chitra Narshingh says, “Certainly, while buying media space for campaigns and ads we keep in mind the target audience and their socio economic factor. That is the deciding factor. It is foolish to buy space in a medium that doesn’t reach your audience”.

Given below are the facts of the Bharat Nirman advertising campaign. 50 per cent of the total budget is allocated to television campaigning. Here are the details as given by DAVP in response to Newslaundry’s RTI application.

Total budget for Bharat Nirman Campaign in this financial year: Rs 185 Crore.

The total committed expenditure for buying air time: Rs 78.01 crore

Total committed expenditure for production: Rs 12.04 crore

Simple mathematics tells us that around 50 per cent of the total ad spend has been allocated to the audio visual medium with news channels being one of the main platforms for the Bharat Nirman ad campaign. Since a large section of the target audience isn’t even watching news, especially English news, what is the point of pumping money into buying this ad space? According to image guru Dilip Cherian, on “Who is keeping the tab?”, every media outlet needs to be given a pie of the government ad spend irrespective of the target audience of the advertisement.

That this misplacement of advertising is being undertaken at the cost of the tax payer’s money is what is disconcerting. V Krishna Ananth, media scholar and History professor at Sikkim University, said in an interview to The Hindu that wasting tax payer’s money for political campaigning is worse than paid news. “In paid news, a politician shells out his ill-gotten wealth. But in this case, taxpayer’s money is being spent to buy space and adding to the private sector’s profit.”

Also, if you have watched the land acquisition ad and the street vendor ads, you would notice that the laws pertaining to both have not yet been implemented.

Elaborating the difference between UPA’s Bharat Nirman campaign and NDA’s India Shining campaign, Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari said in an interview to CNN IBN, “We are not claiming to have solved all the problems (through the campaign). Ours is an understated campaign. We have put facts in public space, let’s leave it to people’s wisdom”.  A lofty thought indeed. If only a little wisdom had been displayed in using public funds in choosing the right medium to reach these very same people.