Rajiv Gandhi's birth anniversary prompts govt ads worth crores
A galaxy of ads - colour, black-and-white, half-page and smaller - all starring Rajiv Gandhi were nestled, many of them adjacent to each other, in today's newspapers. They varied in cost between one and four crores each, depending on whether the ad was created and placed by a private ad agency or by the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP), which coordinates the advertising needs of different government departments. At the former prime minister's samadhi (memorial) in Delhi, Mr Gandhi's wife, Sonia, who is the Congress president, was seen along with her daughter, Priyanka, at a service that was also attended by President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
