Replying to a Right to Information plea by Mumbai based RTI activist Anil Galgali, Praveen Kumar, Under Secretary in the PMO and Central Public Information Officer, said that information about the prime minister’s domestic visits do not come under the purview of any one authority as there are different organisers for the various trips.
Mumbai: The Prime Minister’s Office has said that it does not maintain expense records of the prime minister’s domestic trips, PTI reported on Thursday.
Replying to a Right to Information plea by Mumbai based RTI activist Anil Galgali, Praveen Kumar, Under Secretary in the PMO and Central Public Information Officer, said that information about the prime minister’s domestic visits do not come under the purview of any one authority as there are different organisers for the various trips.
Galgali had sought details about international and domestic visits by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his council of ministers since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power.
Kumar also replied that the prime minister’s tours related to the poll campaigns are not official ones and the PMO does not have to incur any expenditure on these visits and therefore, details cannot be provided.
According to election laws, state machinery cannot be used for campaigning purposes.
With regard to expenses on foreign trips, Kumar said Galgali can find the information on the prime minister’s official website. On details of the Union ministers’ visits, the PMO sent Galgali’s query to Ministry of Home Affairs.
The prime minister’s website says that his domestic visits are paid for by the Ministry of Defence. On foreign visits, the website lists out 49 trips since June 2014 and the expenses incurred on chartered flights for each. According to the PMO website, Modi had made 49 foreign trips since May 2014 till 22 February, 2019.
According to a News18 analysis of the prime minister’s travel information between May 2014 and March this year, Modi had made 328 domestic trips.
The cost of his chartered flight, hotline and aircraft maintenance charges for the foreign trips, as per the official data, come to Rs 2021.59 crore, the report said. The focus of Modi’s domestic visit travels have been states that send most MPs to the Lok Sabha — Uttar Pradesh (66 times) followed by Gujarat (38 times), Maharashtra (29 times), Bihar and Madhya Pradesh (20 times each) the report found.
In February, Scroll.in had analysed Modi’s domestic visits from January 2019. It found that he had made 27 trips in 42 days, covering 18 states and union territories. “On many trips, he combined official work with campaign meetings of the Bharatiya Janata Party,” the report said.
Modi has recently visited several states including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Assam and Jammu and Kashmir to address poll rallies.
According to the PMO website, the expenses on domestic visits of the prime minister are met out of the budget of Ministry of Defence, while the expenses on foreign tours of the prime minister are met out of the budget head “Cabinet Ministers Maintenance of PM’s aircraft Other charges”.