New Delhi, Dec 29 (IANS): Congress MP Manish Tiwari on Sunday asked the Information and Broadcasting Ministry to provide details on the yearly spend by the Narendra Modi government on advertisements in the last five years.

"Put forth queries to the @MIB_India regarding the yearly amount spent by GoI on Print, Broadcasting, Social Media & Outdoor Advertisements between 26th May 2014-30th September 2019 & it's share in the revenue of Top 20 Indian Media," Tiwari said in a tweet.

On his Twitter handle, Tiwari posted the question raised by him in Lok Sabha on November 29 and the answer provided by Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar.

In its reply, the government has said that the Bureau of Outreach and Communication (BOC) releases tenders, auctions and conducts awareness and dissemination programmes about the government schemes and programmes through various media.

During 2013-14 to 2019-20, the per square cm rate of advertisements released in print media has increased from Rs 42.31 to Rs 62.13.

However, the average per year print media space of advertisement given by the BOC has gone down from 11.88 crore square cm during the years 2009-10 to 2013-14 to 10.95 crore square cm for 2014-15 to 2018-19. The reply implies that the per year advertisements in terms of print media space during the UPA II regime were higher than those under the current NDA government.

In the answer, Javadekar added that the details regarding the revenue of private media houses are not maintained by the Government.