Scamster’s firm was awarded ‘Awesome Assam’ ad campaign

Guwahati, October 5, 2018:

Nobody knows how much the Assam government is shelling out on its “Awesome Assam” ad campaign. Worse still is that the government had engaged an advertising company, the owner of which is tainted, to run the ad campaign. The question that now arises is as to how the owner of a company, arrested on a multi-crore rupees advertisement scam, was awarded the contract. Did the government obtain a declaration from the company before awarding the work to it? According to standard procedures, a government needs to check the credentials of a company before engaging it to perform any work.

In the case of Awesome Assam, the Sarbananda Sonowal government was caught on the wrong foot. It had engaged the collaborative of Yaap and Crayons Advertising Agency to run the ad campaign.

One Ajay Chopra, who is the owner of Crayons Advertising Agency, was arrested in May, 2017 by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) in Rajasthan in connection with the advertisement scam. Five separate cases were registered against him by the ACB.

Earlier, the Supreme Court had directed Chopra to surrender in a local court after his anticipatory bail pleas were rejected by the Rajasthan High Court. Fearing trouble, he surrendered and was arrested. In the 2016 West Bengal polls, Crayons had won the creative mandate of BJP’s election campaign.

The Assam government had kept the costs of Awesome Assam ad campaign under the wraps by hiding behind “terms and conditions” of the agreement it had signed with Bollywood diva Priyanka Chopra. The government recently told the Assembly it cannot reveal the costs as per terms and conditions of the agreement. But the people of Assam have every right to know it. After all, the campaign was run on the taxpayers’ money. So, will the government disclose how much it spent on the Awesome Assam ad campaign? Will it also disclose the costs of “Experience Assam” campaign, which was conceptualised and executed by Yaap and Crayons? Will the taxpayers get the answers?