Rs 100 crore for publicity to KCR scheme?

Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao on Thursday launched the much fancied Rythu Bandhu scheme of providing Rs 4,000 per acre to each farmer.

It is considered to be a game-changer in the Telangana politics in the run-up to the 2019 assembly elections.

Over a lakh of people, mostly farmers attended at the public meeting held at Salapalli-Indiranagar in Huzurabad constituency of Karimnagar district. KCR distributed cheques and passbooks to farmers.

All over the state, the scheme would be benefit 58 lakh farmers and the total expenditure is estimated to be around Rs 5,800 crore per season.

However, what is shocking is the amount of money the KCR government has spent on publicising the Rythu Bandhu programme, which is obviously aimed at getting the maximum political mileage to the ruling Telangana Rasthra Samithi.

According to estimates, an amount of Rs 100 crore was spent on a single day on Wednesday for the publicity blitzkrieg for the programme.

Apart from short films and audio-visuals for the programme released to the electronic media, massive jacket advertisements (two full-page advertisements as cover pages) for all the newspapers in the country.

Not only the local newspapers – English, Telugu, Urdu and Hindi, jacket advertisements were given even to the national media papers like Times of India, the Hindu, Hindustan Times and others.

What is more interesting is that advertisements were also given to all the newspapers in other states as well – like Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Odisha, West Bengal, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra in their respective regional languages, apart from, of course, Hindi newspapers in the Hindi-speaking states of north India.

Even in the poll-bound Karnataka, KCR did not give any chance to the major contestants – BJP and the Congress to give last minute appeal to the voters on the last day of the campaign to vote for them in the assembly elections.

The TRS scheme of Rythu Bandhu occupied even Karnataka newspapers!