The ministry has now called a meeting today to figure out how to up its social media game.
New Delhi: The human resource development (HRD) ministry has failed the social media test of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And jolted by an unflattering report on its poor online outreach, it has called a meeting of top officials Friday to address the failure and transform its social media strategy.
The citizen-government interaction portal MyGov recently compiled statistics on each ministry’s social media performance.
The survey listed the number of Twitter and Facebook followers of the ministry, the minister, and important subsidiaries, besides the posts that did well and got the most traction, and those that did not.
The report, dispatched to each ministry this June, painted the HRD ministry as a laggard among Cabinet counterparts such as railways, defence, finance and external affairs.
HRD minister Prakash Javadekar has 1.45 million followers on Twitter, while his finance and corporate affairs counterpart Arun Jaitley has 13.3 million and foreign minister Sushma Swaraj 11.9 million.
Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who took charge over a year after Javadekar became HRD minister, has close to 2 million followers. The two ministers of state for HRD, Satya Pal Singh and Upendra Kushwaha, have around 49,000 and 6,500 followers, respectively.
As for the official Twitter handles of the ministries, HRD has 1.47 million, less than half the railways’ 3.49 million. While the home ministry’s account has 2.49 million followers, the finance ministry’s count is lower than HRD’s at 1.09 million. The official ministry of external affairs handle is under spokesperson Raveesh Kumar’s name and has 1.9 million followers.
The HRD ministry’s subsidiaries have not fared better. For example, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has only close to 4,000 followers, while others such as the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the Central Bureau of Secondary Education (CBSE) do not have very active Twitter handles.
According to the report, the ministry hasn’t been able to do well on Facebook either, despite its larger user pool. Javadekar has fewer followers on Facebook than deputy Singh: 74,000 compared to Singh’s over three lakh.
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Javadekar’s official page also has just 72,000 likes, against just over three lakh for Singh’s. Kushwaha, meanwhile, has over 41,000 followers and just about as many likes.
The official HRD ministry page has over 1.8 lakh likes and 1.8 lakh followers. The MEA, meanwhile, has over two million followers and likes, while both statistics top a million for the finance ministry. The railway ministry’s follower and like count is nearly identical at just around 1.5 million.
Even some subsidiaries of other ministries have more followers than the HRD ministry’s Facebook page. For example, Doordarshan News, which falls under the information & broadcasting ministry, has 3.2 million followers.
A dressing down from the PM
The report signals the defeat of certain initiatives undertaken by the HRD ministry after Prime Minister Modi, at the end of last year, reprimanded Javadekar for the ministry’s social media outreach.
“The PM was upset that despite being a department that connects with young people and basically works for them, the HRD ministry does not have a good presence on social media,” a highly placed source in the ministry said.
“Education is an area of interest to young people, which means HRD should have more followers, but that is not the case,” the source added.
The PM had reportedly asked the minister to step up his game. One of the steps the ministry took is asking all the government institutions and affiliates to set up a Twitter handle and promote their good work on it.
The ministry had even arranged a workshop for all the major institutions a couple of months ago to make them aware about the challenges of social media and familiarise them with the needs of a healthy online presence.
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Annual scores of learning outcomes in government schools continue to show dismal results. That should be a greater concern for the HRD ministry. If Twitter followers were the criterion, the Indian economy and diplomacy ought to have been in geostationary orbit.