Jammu Kashmir Booked Rs 70-Crore Ad Spend in 28 Months

SRINAGAR: The control of government advertising over the media in Jammu and Kashmir is not new, but fresh data obtained through Right to Information (RTI) queries gives one of the clearest pictures yet of how public funds are being used to shape news coverage in the Valley.

According to an investigation by Newslaundry, the Jammu and Kashmir administration under Lt Governor Manoj Sinha spent at least Rs 70 crore on print advertisements between April 2022 and October 2024. Five newspapers – three English and two Urdu – cornered 26 per cent of this total.

The findings are based on two RTI applications, one filed by Mohammad Iqbal Wani, owner and editor-in-chief of the Srinagar-based daily Iqbal E Kashmir, and another by Srinagar resident Bilal Ahmad Mir. The replies covered ad allocation to 147 newspapers between April 2023 and October 2024 and to 140 newspapers between April 2022 and March 2023.

Since the RTI responses mentioned ad space only in centimetres, Newslaundry calculated the revenue by multiplying the space with the lowest per-centimetre rate prescribed by the Directorate of Information and Public Relations (DIPR) – Rs 75 for black-and-white inner page ads. Front-page colour ads can cost up to Rs 135 per cm.

The top five recipients of government advertising in the period were English daily Rising Kashmir (Rs 7.73 crore), Urdu paper Aftab Daily (Rs 3.7 crore), Srinagar News (Rs 2.5 crore), Kashmir Images (Rs 2.26 crore) and Kashmir Monitor (Rs 2.1 crore).

But the numbers also reveal sharp cuts for some publications. Greater Kashmir’s ad revenue dropped by 65 per cent between April 2023 and October 2024 compared to the previous year. Ads to Kashmir Life have been stopped for many years now.

These fluctuations are not new. In 2021, several editors told the Press Council of India’s fact-finding committee that advertisements were being “sanctioned or withdrawn as part of a carrot-and-stick strategy to discourage critical news coverage”. The committee had found that 17 publications in Kashmir and 26 in Jammu had their ads suspended, often without explanation.