MPs owe Rs 7.30 crore in phone bills

It seems the people's representatives are oblivious to the fact that making phone calls costs money and they have to pay bills like the man on the street. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Nov 23, 2011, 09:33:50 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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It seems the people's representatives are oblivious to the fact that making phone calls costs money and they have to pay bills like the man on the street.

Altogether 405 present and former members of Parliament owe Rs 7.30 crore to public sector Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd for bills not paid for years.

Every MP is entitled to two fixed line telephone connections – one in Delhi and other in his or her usual place of residence --- and two mobile phones with national roaming facility. For these telephone services, members get 50,000 free local calls in a year.

In a reply filed under transparency law, the Right To Information (RTI), the MTNL has provided a list of 405 MPs, including six MPs of the present Parliament, who had defaulted on payment.

Among sitting MPs, five are from Congress and one from Janata Dal (United).

Congress MPs on the list are Bhakta Charan Das from Orissa (Rs 3,31,020), GV Harsha Kumar from Andhra Pradesh (Rs 2,06,880), M Krishna Swamy from Tamil Nadu (Rs 3,19,740) and Harsh Vardhan, from Uttar Pradesh (Rs 36,744).

The sole Rajya Sabha MP in the defaulters list is Narender Budhania of Congress from Rajasthan with an outstanding amount of Rs 1,33,777. The non-Congress MP is Ram Sunder Das of Janata Dal (United) from Bihar (Rs 9,49,866).

The remaining outstanding is from former MPs and the MTNL told RTI applicant Subhash Chandra Agrawal that action was being taken against the members as per rules. The action being taken is not voluntary. It is as per directions issued by Delhi high court in a public interest litigation filed by a social group Krishak Bharat.

The MPs also owe money to the urban development ministry for using residential accommodation beyond prescribed limit. Among the defaulters listed provided by the ministry is Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar with an outstanding of Rs 1.98 crore for 6 Krishna Menon Marg.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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