NEW DELHI: The Narendra Modi government has decided to hold fortnightly talkathons, with a Union minister interacting with people on social media including Youtube , addressing live and spontaneous questions as part of an initiative which comes shortly after the BJP’s drubbing in the recent Delhi polls that a section of the party believes resulted from its failure to reach out to the masses and explain its policies.“The idea is not just to interact with people but also to answer their difficult questions. Policymakers are thinking hard before taking every decision and the thought process has to be conveyed to people,” said a senior official of the information and broadcasting ministry, which will organise the talkathon events.The initiative was launched without much fanfare on Monday evening, with minister Piyush Goyal taking 20 questions in 30 minutes, mostly on electricity, coal allocation, energy, pressures of being a minister in Modi’s cabinet and even why he was chosen to be US President Barack Obama’s minister in waiting.Next in line, people familiar with the matter said, could be ministers including Suresh Prabhu and Arun Jaitley , who may talk about the upcoming rail and financial budgets, although the names are yet to be finalised.“The idea is to listen to grouses, complaints and interrogations, so that myths about the government are not propagated. A participant on Monday asked the minister why Tamil Nadu was given a government award on renewable energy recently when many of its wind farms were not working, and the minister took note of that,” the official cited earlier said.During the talkathons, questions will be taken from Facebook and Twitter while the minister’s replies will be streamed live through Youtube. “The format is inspired from PM Modi’s Mann Ki Baat, but we will make sure the questions here are live and are also chosen wisely to form a balanced bouquet of queries,” another official said.Earlier, the government was planning to have weekly interactive sessions on All India Radio with secretaries of different ministries. However, officials said, very few IAS officers agreed to the proposal, after which it was decided that the ministers should be roped in to increase the government’s connect with the masses.The decision was made a few days ago, officials said, when the ministry received reports of the PM not being happy with the government’s media outreach, particularly in interior areas.Senior officials of the ministry then conducted meetings with department heads and nodal officials, and asked them to make dissemination of information a priority. A few days ago, I&B Minister Arun Jaitley had also held brainstorming workshops with the officials to improve media management, where it was decided that the government should use all avenues of media to interact with people and not lose touch with the masses.