Express News Service
CHENNAI: Of late, the sports ministry seems to be busy with publicity. It apparently spent more than `2 crore for promoting achievements of India medal-winners at the Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast.
This includes ads on TV channels, in print and on radio. In 2016-17, the Olympic year, the same ministry spent only Rs 7 lakh.
In a letter to Sports Secretary Rahul Bhatnagar, Indian Olympic Association (IOA) President Narinder Batra said that the sports ministry has diverted funds from the National Sports Federations’ (NSF) budget for conducting promotional activities.
Batra also questioned whether it was prudent to publicise medal- winners of Commonwealth Games with the money allocated to NSFs. He has requested that NSF funds should not be used for any sort of publicity.
According to a copy of a letter circulated between Sports Authority of India (SAI) and the sports ministry, a total of Rs 2,70,29,445 was spent on advertising and publicising winners for generating interest among the masses to take up sports as a career.
On top of that, the ministry is planning to spend an additional Rs 1.2 crore for the same cause with the hope of meeting that expenditure from internal revenue through its stadia activities.
According to information sourced from Director of Finances, SAI — that is also mentioned in the letter — Rs 7,07,597 was released by the sports ministry to meet publicity expenditures for the year 2016-17, and no funds were released the following year. The sudden rise in the amount that is originally meant for the “welfare and development of infrastructures for athletes” is worrying the IOA ahead of the 2020 Olympics.
“On one side, we talk of mission Olympic’s 2020 and medal winning and on other side we are reducing budget for NSF’s training to be spent on electronic media publicity (sic),” Batra added, expressing his concern. The 2018-19 budget allotted by the government for NSFs is Rs 342 crore.
Since the sports ministry does not have enough funds to meet the entire promotional expenditure of `2.7 crore, a request had already been made to carve out Rs 1.5 crore out of the NSF budget.
However, Bhatnagar said that there is no reason to panic, and that such scenarios are very common when there is a shortage of funding. “It is nothing like what it looks. We keep interchanging funds between various departments when there is an emergency, and `2.7 crore is a very minimal amount from a budget of `340 crore. Any amount deducted will be recouped at the earliest,” he told Express.
