Drive through almost any town in Madhya Pradesh and the state government is impossible to avoid. Hoardings at the chowk. Full pages in the morning paper. Sponsored posts around every government event. Chief Minister Mohan Yadav’s face is on most of them, and not only inside the state. Madhya Pradesh government advertisements have turned up at bus stops in Delhi and at the capital’s airport. 

In 2023-24 and 2024-25, the two most recent years for which audited spending is available, Madhya Pradesh spent Rs 1,413.76 crore under the advertisement and publicity head alone. That works out to Rs 1.93 crore for every day of those two years. In both years, the government spent more on publicity than it had initially told the legislature it would.

For the current year, 2025-26, look at the projection: the Public Relations Department was allocated Rs 632.37 crore for advertising and publicity, and mid-year revised estimates have already pushed that figure to Rs 727.93 crore. If it holds, the three-year total reaches Rs 2,141.69 crore, an average of Rs 1.95 crore a day. 

The department that spends this money, known as Jansampark, sits in the Chief Minister’s portfolio.

The single biggest publicity year in this period was an election year, budgeted and largely spent before Yadav took office in December 2023. But the pattern outlasted the change of Chief Minister.

The election-year surge

The financial year 2023-24 was Madhya Pradesh’s assembly election year. The budget for that year had been presented months earlier, and the bulk of the year was run by the previous BJP government under Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

That is the year publicity spending broke records. Actual spending reached Rs 817.58 crore against a budget estimate of Rs 513.59 crore, an overshoot of nearly Rs 304 crore, or 59 percent more than the government had said it would spend. For scale, the Public Relations Department's total expenditure, publicity and everything else combined, was Rs 285.14 crore in........

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