As many as 60 ministries and departments of the Centre have to clear dues worth Rs 204 crore to the Bureau of Outreach and Communication (BOC), which is the Government of India’s nodal agency for advertising, News18 has learnt. The pending amount mentioned is as of the last quarter of 2021.
BOC, which comes under the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) ministry, not only executes various multimedia and communication campaigns for the GoI, but also acts as an advisory body to the Centre on media strategies. It was formed in 2017, by merging three erstwhile media units under the I&B ministry—namely the Directorate of Advertising and Publicity, the Directorate of Field Publicity and the Song and Drama division.
‘Outstanding’ performances
As per data available until the end of last year, the Ministry of Finance has the highest amount of dues pending at Rs 18.54 crore, followed by the Defence Ministry at Rs 17.88 crore and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare at Rs 17.30 crore.
Other ministries that have large pending dues include the ministries of Agriculture at Rs 13.48 crore, Road Transport and Highways at Rs 11.75 crore and Human Resources Development at Rs 11.44 crore.
The ministries of Railways, Steel and New & Renewable Energy have the least dues pending among all, at Rs 48,664, Rs 5.99 lakh and Rs 17.66 lakh, respectively.
When the ministries settle the outstanding dues that they owe to the BOC, the agency in turn makes payments to different media organisations that run the government advertising and media campaigns.
It is immediately not known for how long these dues are pending, even as in a recent letter to all ministries, I&B secretary Apurva Chandra said they have been “long overdue”.
Chandra stated in the communication last year that only after the BOC receives the funds from the ministries concerned, it clears the pending dues to the vendors from its end. News18 has accessed the letter.
Chandra said in it that an additional director general of BOC has been nominated to look into the matter and requested the ministries to appoint a nodal officer for the purpose as well, to ensure the “long overdue outstanding amount of vendors may be cleared on receipt of required funds”.
Steps taken to recover dues
Senior government officials explained that pending dues towards government media campaigns undertaken by the BOC has been a perennial problem.
A senior government official explained that this has been the case in the past many years and despite repeated letters and follow-ups only some take the effort to clear all dues fully.
A report submitted by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology on December 1, 2021, noted that several efforts have been made to settle the outstanding dues by the respective client ministry or department and this includes a series of letters from the I&B secretary to his counterparts in other ministries.
Stating that the outstanding claims of the BOC for 2019-20 and 2020-21 was Rs 103.95 crore, the panel sought formulation of guidelines by the I&B ministry to fix a deadline for releasing the funds.
The I&B ministry, in its reply to the committee, said that among other policy mechanisms put in place, the Print Media Advertisement Policy 2020 has incorporated a clause that all ministries and departments should place funds in advance, in absence of which the BOC may not release the advertisement or undertake any campaign, except in an exigency.
It said similar clauses have been incorporated in policies related to campaigns through social media.
“In a review in the Ministry of I&B, BOC has been directed not to undertake any fresh paid campaign of the Ministries/Departments unless they have cleared their old pendency,” the ministry had said.
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