BJP lawmaker wants ban on surrogate ads

Amid the recent controversy over yoga guru Ramdev's infertility medicine, a parliamentarian has sought a ban on surrogate advertisements, saying they were misleading the consumers.

Devji Mansingram Patel, the Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Jalore in Rajasthan, in a letter written in Hindi to Information and Broadcasting Minister Arun Jaitley, sought a ban on such advertisements.

"There is a ban on advertisements of alcoholic products in the country, but manufacturers of liquor are misleading the consumers through surrogate advertisements," he wrote.

The letter explained how the manufacturers were misleading television viewers, as well as readers of newspapers and magazines by advertising their products as packaged drinking water and soda water.

"Anyone can understand that these are advertisements of liquor products but the manufacturers are freely fooling the people and nobody is raising their voices against the ads."

Terming such advertisements "surrogate", Patel said they were creating a negative impact on society.

He said such advertisements were so frequent that viewers cannot ignore them.

He said the impact was so huge that nowadays people were using tag lines like "Daag Achhe Hain" (stains are good) and "Sirf naam hi kafi hai" (name is enough) in their day to day lives.

"So I urge you (Jaitley) to take note of it and start the process of banning them," Patel wrote.