The Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh has spent ₹6,811.94 crore on advertising and publicity between 2017-18 and 2024-25. That works out to an average of ₹2.32 crore every day. The figure exceeds the daily advertising spend of the Modi government at the Centre, which has spent roughly ₹1.5 crore a day over 11 years, or about ₹6,000 crore in total.
The expenditure is routed through the state’s Information and Public Relations Department and is drawn from official budget documents. Spending began at ₹294.86 crore in 2017-18, the first full financial year of the Adityanath administration, and rose steadily. It dipped to ₹392.88 crore in the pandemic year of 2020-21 before surging to ₹1,134.31 crore in 2021-22 and peaking at ₹1,420.03 crore in 2022-23, an election year. In 2024-25 the figure stood at ₹1,391.18 crore.
More than 83 percent of the total, or ₹5,658.16 crore, went into advertising and visual publicity across newspapers, television and other media. Field publicity accounted for ₹220.49 crore, film production ₹20.32 crore, community radio and television ₹11.46 crore, and photo services ₹7.73 crore. For 2025-26 the government has budgeted ₹918.83 crore under the same heads. If fully spent, the nine-year total would approach ₹7,730 crore, or about ₹2.35 crore a day.
The scale of the outlay raises questions about priorities In a state that continues to face deficits in education, health and rural infrastructure. Public money spent at this intensity on self-promotion sits uneasily beside the persistent gaps in basic services that affect ordinary citizens. Governments have a legitimate need to communicate schemes and achievements. Spending more than ₹2 crore every day, year after year, on advertising and publicity goes well beyond routine information dissemination and begins to look like a permanent political campaign funded by the taxpayer.
The contrast with the Centre is Instructive. A national government covering the entire country has spent less per day on advertising than a single state administration. The Uttar Pradesh numbers have grown most sharply in the years leading into and following elections, suggesting that the publicity machine is calibrated to political cycles as much as to governance needs.
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Opposition voices have described the expenditure as an excess of image-building over delivery. The government has not released detailed breakdowns of which media houses or platforms received the bulk of the advertising revenue, and RTI requests on the subject have met resistance. Without greater transparency on the recipients and the content of the campaigns, the public is left with a simple arithmetic fact: over eight years, the state has chosen to devote a very large and rising sum of public money to telling its own story.
The real question is not how effectively the government has advertised itself, but whether the same urgency has been shown in addressing the problems those advertisements seek to overshadow. The billions spent on shaping perception are undeniable. Whether citizens have received comparable value in governance remains open to judgment.
