The Government will have to address several shortcomings for effective implementation of official media outreach programme. The foremost impediment is general reticence in top bureaucracy to part with developmental information for dissemination and publicity despite well-knit information architecture for fear of being under pressure as extraneous to their routine work. Fighting negative sentiments generated against the Government by the mushrooming private electronic and print media, development not making news in the current scenario, elements in the ruling party and Government itself speaking in conflicting voices in violation of the Constitutional postulates of justice, equality, fraternity and fair-play with impunity resulting in evolving heightened social tension, fear psychosis, insecurity and deprivation among vulnerable sections of people, lack of right initiatives, professionalism, bureaucrat like conduct of information personnel, and their inability to establish right chord with the media, are some major challenges for the media outreach programme to succeed.

Other major problems to be addressed are increasingly depleting manpower in official media units, making them moribund and truncated notwithstanding myriad changes in technology, dependence on poor quality of outsourced work in media units, Press Information Bureau’s (PIB) departmental publicity officers overstretched to deliver on account of being attached to more than one Ministries, lack of parity of information services with security services to stop depletion of information personnel unlike civil services in general, lack of penetration of internet across the country, strengthening multi-lingual publicity programme in regional and branch offices of official media units, strengthening of multi-lingual AIR and Door Darshan news services for a better outreach to people all over the country including far flung hitherto untouched areas.

The way forward in the circumstances enjoins the Government to function cohesively in the country’s well knit system of rule of law based system of democratic governance, with no conflicting signals to the people, first disseminate official information routinely in a well integrated coordinated way through official media followed by social media, whose reach is limited to urban/suburban few, reach out to people in their own languages, strengthen official media units, PIB, news services of AIR, DD, revive and strengthen Field Publicity, Films Division, Songs &Drama Division, if at all, the Government is serious about success of its media outreach strategy. Above all, go for lateral entry from diverse media professionals with core competencies to infuse freshness, vigour and enthusiasm in the Indian Information Service (IIS) for a better and meaningful media outreach. Dissemination of PIB’s regional and branch offices in languages and vernacular is so late, so poor and so ill strategized that virtually there is black-out of Central Government’s developmental information and publicity in the regional and local media. Media relations in the regional and branch offices need to be improved to generate public goodwill for the Government. Most of the social sector welfare programmes remain underutilized for want of adequate information to the people.

In the long run, there is an utmost need for delinking IIS from combined civil services exams and go for a separate recruitment in line with the Indian Economic Service/Indian Statistical Service, requiring personnel with diverse professional media experiences and qualifications to meet the special official media units’ requirements. The current breed of IIS personnel, as such, have failed to stem the rot given its media unfriendly behavioural quotient, bureaucratic arrogance, inaccessibility to media persons, inability to meet queries fielded by media persons, inability to establish right kind of press relations to generate public trust and goodwill for the government and its wholesale failure to deliver!