You’re in Uttarakhand, scrolling past another government advertisement in your WhatsApp inbox. It’s a festival greeting you’ll delete without reading. A message that cost Rs 37 lakh to send to every phone in the state. Enough to buy a Toyota Fortuner.

You switch on your TV at night and see another government ad, unaware that a channel from and largely focussed on Nagaland is running the same ads for your state government. The channel gets over Rs 1 crore for ads. More than most homes would cost in your hill town.

In fact, ads alone have drained over Rs 1,001 crore from the Uttarakhand state exchequer in the last five years. Potentially more than the public money spent on mid-day meals.

Now pull this lens back. What looks like a text here, and a TV spot there comes into focus as part of a much larger picture: a publicity machine running on public money. A machine that has spent Rs 55 lakh each day. 

This is among India’s most aggressive publicity campaigns by any state government. And unprecedented for a state with a population as small as Uttarakhand’s.

But here’s what makes this story even more startling: most of this spending explosion happened after Pushkar Singh Dhami became Chief Minister in July 2021. Within months of taking office, his administration rewrote the rules that would determine which TV channels could receive government advertising money. And these adjustments were followed by an unprecedented flow of public funds to media outlets across the country.

Consider the numbers. In 2020-21, when Trivendra Singh Rawat was Chief Minister, the government spent Rs 77 crore on advertisements. The following year, after Dhami took charge, that figure jumped to Rs 227 crore – a nearly three-fold increase. Even accounting for assembly elections, the scale was massive. By 2024-25, annual advertising expenditure had reached Rs 290 crore, as per government expenditure documents spanning five years reviewed by Newslaundry.

Of the Rs 1,001.07 crore spent in these five financial years, most of the spending – around Rs 923 crore – happened in the last four financial years. Dhami was in the CM’s seat during these four years – except for around three months in 2021-22 when Tirath Singh Rawat held the post.

Television dominated the ad spree, consuming nearly Rs 402 crore over the last four years – about half the total advertising budget and a little less than the around Rs 426 crore spent if all five years are taken into account. 

The rest of the money in the Dhami years was spent on newspapers (Rs 129.6 crore), digital (Rs 61.9 crore), radio (Rs 30.9 crore), films (Rs 23.4 crore), SMS (Rs 40.4 crore), outdoor ads (Rs 49.5 crore), booklets (Rs 56 crore), and ad agencies (Rs 128.7 crore). 

Years before ad bonanza, a court order

To address the misuse of public funds on partisan publicity, the Supreme Court in its landmark Common Cause vs Union of India (2015) case set up a committee led by legal scholar N R Madhava Menon. The Menon Committee was tasked with framing principles to ensure government advertisements serve public interest rather than political agendas. Its guidelines, later upheld by the court, stressed that campaigns must be directly related to government responsibilities, presented in an objective and accessible manner, free from partisan promotion, cost-effective and efficient, and fully compliant with legal and financial norms. Together, these safeguards were meant to balance the legitimate informative role of government advertising with the need to prevent its arbitrary and political misuse.

There are several concerns that remain despite the 2015 order. 

First, states routinely publish ads outside their own territorial limits, wasting taxpayers’ money on campaigns that serve no local public interest. Second, many ads appear as advertorials disguised as news, misleading readers and amounting to paid news. Third, governments heavily advertise during elections, distorting the level playing field and giving the ruling party an unfair advantage. Fourth, the oversight body – the Committee on Content Regulation of Government Advertisements – is often accused of being toothless, as it reports to the very ministry often under scrutiny. The widespread use of politicians’ photographs on official ads, despite court restrictions, has turned public communication into personality projection, further blurring the line between state information and partisan propaganda.

Some of these concerns could have played out in Uttarakhand, where the government altered its media advertisement accreditation rules in December 2021, just months after Dhami became CM. These changes expanded the criteria for empanelment, allowing a much broader group of media channels to qualify for government advertising. 

Where previously channels needed to broadcast at least 16 hours daily and provide detailed reports on their programming, now they only needed to be licensed by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and operating for one year. The requirement for daily bulletins totaling 80 minutes was replaced with three bulletins of 30 minutes each. Most significantly, the verification process was simplified – instead of district officers conducting thorough assessments under District Magistrates, cable operator certificates verified by district information officers became sufficient.

The CM’s discretionary powers to grant exemptions remained unchanged.

What followed was an advertising bonanza.

Curious cases in a TV spree

In these four years, national channels received a total of Rs 105.7 crore. Among such channels, News18 India consistently topped recipient lists, with the Reliance-owned Network 18 group receiving Rs 5.69 crore in 2024-25 alone – a total of more than Rs 9.49 crore in the Dhami years. 

In the last financial year, Times Now got Rs 4.79 crore, while TV Today Network, including Aaj Tak, received Rs 4.62 crore. The year also marked NDTV’s first significant appearance as a beneficiary, earning Rs 2.88 crore – months after its acquisition by the Adani Group.