The Congress-led government in Madhya Pradesh intended to organise IIFA (International Indian Film Academy Awards) award ceremonies claiming that the event would project the state on the global stage. On Feb 3, in a glamorous event attended by Bollywood stars Salman Khan and Jacqueline Fernandez, the organizers and then chief minister Kamal Nath had announced the IIFA-2020 would take place in Indore. The event was scheduled for the last week of March, but due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the event was postponed.
Times of India (TOI) on April 10, 2020, with the headline saying, ‘Shivraj transfers 700 crores allocated to IIFA-2020 to CM Relief Fund.’ The web version of the report is no longer available, but the published story can still be accessed through the e-paper of TOI’s Bhopal edition.
The report by TOI went viral on social media and was quoted extensively across all platforms.
The Indian National Congress refuted the claims and calling it a diversion tactic of the BJP government to hide its shortcomings in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. Madhya Pradesh Congress Working President Jitu Patwari denied the existence of any such budget allocation. He claimed that it was a sponsor-funded event and that the amount to be quoted in the media was false.
Further, reports quote chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on the funds allocated to the IIFA being transferred to the CM relief fund to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, but Chouhan makes no mention of the amount allocated.
The first three paragraphs of the article talk about the IIFA story, other than that nowhere IIFA finds no mention in the entire article and neither the â¹700 crore ballpark figure. The rest of the article talks about the identification of hotspots and other preventive measures of COVID-19.
The same story was also picked up by other media outlets, without mentioning any proof of the exact amount allocated.
The Logical Indian found not claims of â¹700 Crore being allocated for IIFA ceremonies. At the time of the article, there was no mention of such claims on any of the official channels of the state government or the BJP Party. In the video report of ‘Amar Ujala,’ we can see CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan talking about the transfer of IIFA funds to the CM relief fund, but didn’t mention the exact amount. At the 0:36-minute mark in the video CM admits to not knowing the exact amount allocated but mentions an approximate figure of â¹40 crore’.
Given the evidence, it is true that the funds allocated to the IIFA event in Indore are being transferred to the CM relief fund, but the figure of â¹700 crores floating around social media posts is meagre speculation originating from the TOI report.
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