Economic Times: New Delhi: Saturday, June
08, 2013.
In a move to
increase transparency in government, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) on
Friday disclosed that 642 crore has been spent on Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh's foreign air travel since he took over in 2004. The prime minister uses
a Business Boeing Jet of the Indian Air Force to go abroad.
The PMO
website has listed 62 foreign trips undertaken by the prime minister from 2004
till April 2013, specifying the expense incurred on air travel on each visit.
The expenses on 62 trips have been disclosed, which totals to approximately Rs
642 crore. Bills for five more trips are still to be computed as per the list.
The most recent trip of the prime minister to Japan and Thailand in May does
not feature in the list.
The
initiative is under Section 4 of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, which asks
all government departments to disclosure information of public interest.
"We have a commitment of openness to the public and we have carried out
that promise through this step," the Communications Advisor to the Prime
Minister, Pankaj Pachauri, told ET.
Pankaj
Pachauri added that PMO had also earlier made public details of salary earned
by every official in the PMO, including its top officers. This is the first
time in nine years that the government has made public the expense incurred on
the prime minister's foreign trips. There was a furore last year after a Right
to Information reply to activist Subhash Chand Agrawal revealed that 205 crore
was spent on former President Pratibha Patil's foreign visits, surpassing the
spending of all her predecessors. Patil, during her five-year-long tenure,
undertook over a dozen foreign trips to 22 countries across four continents.
The list
shows that the most expensive trip undertaken by the PM was his seven-day visit
last June to Mexico for the G-20 Summit and to Brazil for UN Conference on
Sustainable Development - the expense on air-travel for this visit was nearly
Rs 27 crore. The PM's nine-day long trip to the US and France in 2008 was the
second-most expensive trip with an air travel bill of Rs 24 crore. Singh then
went to New York to attend the 63rd Session of the UN General Assembly,
proceeded to Washington at the invitation of then US President George Bush for
bilateral discussions on various issues, including the civil nuclear initiative
and then to France for the India-European Union Summit. The prime minister's
week-long visit to Washington on a bilateral visit at the invitation of
President Barack Obama and for attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government
Summit in Trinidad and Tobago in November 2009 cost Rs 21 crore to the
exchequer.
In April
2010, the prime minister was back in the US for attending the Nuclear Security
Summit and also went to Brazil for IBSA and BRIC Summits - the air travel bill
for the 8-day trip came to Rs 22 crore. The PM has made eight trips to the US
since 2004 till date, the maximum for any country, while he has made four trips
apiece to France and the United Kingdom.
.JPG)
.JPG)
