The Congress party would require Rs 100 crore during the next 18 months - till the Lok Sabha elections - to counter the main opposition BJP in the field of social media, telecom minister Kapil Sibal said at the session on emerging political challenges at the party's Chintan Shivir at Jaipur last Saturday. 
 
The BJP, he said, had a hundred people tweeting against the Congress in the morning. By afternoon, the tweets would become news on TV channels and by the next day, they became headlines in the print media. 
 
Sibal made a strong case for a pro-active approach to the social media. He pointed out that the BJP made extensive use of the social media to reach out to the middle class. He referred to the anti-government blitz on social networking sites following the brutal bus rape case and earlier during the Anna Hazare-led agitation for a Jan Lokpal Bill, which snowballed into street protests.