The YSR Congress party, which had been in power for power for five years between 2019 and 2024, had spent Rs 328.38 crore on its campaign during the recent assembly and Lok Sabha elections in the state, according to its latest election expenditure report the party had submitted to the Election Commission of India.
Needless to say, this was just an official figure disclosed to the Election Commission as per the records. But, analysts say the actual expenditure could be at least 10 times more than what was shown in the records.
The records pertained to the expenditure incurred by the YSRCP between March 16, when the election schedule was announced by the EC, till June 6, till the election process was completed and the model code of conduct ended.
As per the record, the total expenditure shown for all the YSRCP candidates in all the 175 assembly and 25 Lok Sabha constituencies was Rs 328,38,60,946. Nearly 27 percent of the expenditure – Rs 87.36 crore was spent on election campaign in the media.
Among the money spent on media houses for publicity for the party during the elections, the lion’s share has gone to Sakshi media house, owned by Jagan’s family.
An amount of Rs 16.84 crore was spent on advertisements to Sakshi media house, including Rs 12 crore for television and Rs 4.84 crore for newspaper.
The second biggest beneficiary of YSRCP media campaign was TV9 television channel, which was given advertisements worth Rs 16.51 crore. Similarly, NTV channel was given advertisements worth Rs 7.08 crore.
The party spent Rs 8.26 crore on Google advertisements, Rs 6.99 crore on Star India, Rs 5.52 crore on Deccan Media, 5.01 crore on Spoorthy Communications (which runs 10 TV channel) etc.
The party also spent Rs 4.42 crore to Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) for outdoor publicity and Rs 2.36 crore to I-Dream Media.
Besides, many other media houses and digital media entities were also paid lakhs of rupees for campaigning for the YSRCP in the elections.
Interestingly, the party declared to the EC that it had spent Rs 21.42 crore on star campaigners and out of this amount, Rs 21.41 crore was spent only on Jagan Mohan Reddy towards his helicopter, aircraft and bus expenditures.
It clearly showed that there are no other star campaigners in the YSRCP and Jagan is the one and only one star campaigner!
