PIB gives Modi government something to cringe about on its third anniversary
Today in massive screw-ups, the Press Information Bureau (PIB) – the government agency that disseminates plans, policies, programme initiatives and achievements to the media – copy-pasted a news article that was rather critical of the government’s three-year run.
YES!
Celebrating the third anniversary of the Modi Sarkaar, PIB’s job was to obviously list out all the things NDA has achieved in the thousand odd days it has been since they came to power with a mandate. But instead of doing that, they (somebody whose job is probably in jeopardy right now) uploaded a 10-page report on the Modi government’s successes and failures in various sectors. Of course, it is a totally different matter that the report in question turned out to be – not only not a government document – a report by Mint that was published both on the newspaper and digitally, earlier in the day.
People were obviously shocked to see a government, that usually silences criticism by calling people anti-national, being so self-critical and so introspective. After all, this is way out of character.
So going as per PIB release the BJP sarkar admits its failures on all fronts in past 3 years. #3SaalBekaarSarkaar pic.twitter.com/G8zeE1covP
— Priyanka Chaturvedi (@priyankac19) May 26, 2017
Soon, though not so soon enough, people stumbled upon the truth.
@KanchanGupta And if I may make it "curioser", the report card carried by FE is actually Mint's assessment of this government published in this AM's paper
— sukumar ranganathan (@mint_ed) May 26, 2017
The train of mess-ups that should have been stopped right there, was unfortunately carried forward further by Financial Express, which ran a story based on the PIB report that was actually a Mint report card. Both PIB and Financial Express deleted the stories, but the damage was already done.
@milindmody @KanchanGupta Published in today's Mint. Am told someone from PIB did a cut-paste from website and sent it out.
— sukumar ranganathan (@mint_ed) May 26, 2017
@RohanV @sruthisagar @sruthijith @Bhuvanbagga @thakur_meenal Now FE has also pulled down the story and put up a notice. pic.twitter.com/dJ8tGz41I6
— Vivek Kushwaha (@yoursvivek) May 26, 2017
Of course, this is not the first time PIB has been this authentic in their reportage. During the catastrophic Chennai floods of 2015, PIB had shared an image on their Twitter account that showed Narendra Modi looking at the flooded streets of Chennai from an aircraft window.
The image was not so much “real”, as it was “photoshopped”. Someone, again probably someone who lost their job after that, photoshopped the inundated streets of Chennai to an image of Modi looking out the window in a plane.
C’mon, @PIB_India. Stay away from Photoshop. pic.twitter.com/VpxHtj7mHG
— Tanvi Madan (@tanvi_madan) December 3, 2015
But who cares about authenticity in the age of fake news, right?