Kathmandu, August 13 :

A total of Rs 12.9 million, the payment of which was promised by the new government to various newspapers under the head of “welfare advertisements” is still pending, a government official today said.

The official at the Department of Information said the government owed newspapers Rs 28 million which should have been cleared by the end of the last fiscal year, but it could only pay Rs 16.4 million to them because of the financial crunch and lack of coordination between the Ministries of Information and Finance. The official added that since the government had failed to clear the dues on time and as the advertisements were being published regularly as per policy, the dues were mounting.“Newspaper owners are yet to get around Rs 12,925,000 from the government in the last fiscal year,” the official said. He, however, clarified that it was not as if the government had blocked payment. Actually, it was a matter of procedure and availability of resources at the right slot.General secretary of the Federation of Nepalese Journalists, Mahendra Bista said that the government’s indecisiveness was hampering the livelihood of hundreds of journalists and threatening the survival of low-budget newspapers.

“The government should take a quick decision on how to solve the problem of the newspapers which are still waiting for payment,” he said, adding that the state minister for information Dilendra Prasad Badu had promised on June 6 that the dues would be cleared as soon as possible. Nothing has been done so far, he said.