PMO says nahi to NHAI

NEW DELHI: After Congress president Sonia Gandhi, the Prime Minister’s Office has turned down a proposal of the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) to put up photographs of Sonia Gandhi and Mr Manmohan Singh on highway billboards.

The PMO said that no permission was sought from it or the Prime Minister for putting up Mr Singh’s photographs. NHAI had proposed to put up 1,488 billboards with pictures of the prime minister and the UPA chairperson at 25 km intervals on both sides of national highways.

“The cabinet secretary has been requested, with a copy endorsed to the NHAI chairman, to suitably reiterate instructions to all ministries and government departments that the use of photographs of the prime minister should be done with prior approval of the PMO,” a communication issued by the PMO had said last month. This was conveyed in response to a RTI query by Mr Subhash Chandra Agrawal.

The PMO’s direction was issued within days of Ms Gandhi reportedly conveying to highways minister Kamal Nath that she was not keen on her photographs appearing on billboards.

NHAI head office had sent a circular in October, 2009, to all its project directors regarding provision of the display boards. The idea would have cost around Rs 60 crore if the each of the 20 ft x 10 ft billboard was estimated at Rs four lakh. The boards were to display project-related information like the name of the concessionaire, the name of the supervision engineers, project cost, name of project director and telephone number.

The NHAI has said, in response to Mr Agrawal’s RTI query earlier, that the display boards would be put up by the contractor and that the NHAI would not incur any expenditure on this account.

Besides facing opposition accusation of using national assets for political propaganda, the proposal came up just when Congress was talking about austerity. Experience of such picture boards have shown that they could just end up as wasteful expenditure. Picture boards carrying photographs of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had been put up on national highways during the NDA regime. These had to be covered later on directions of the then Election Commission because of Lok Sabha elections. The boards were later changed or dismantled. At that time, Congress had criticised the effort of highways minister B C Khanduri.