EC foreign travel bill jumps eight-fold in five years
At the time the government was observing austerity, the Election Commission’s expenses on foreign travel jumped by eight times as compared to just a 10% jump in the cost of domestic travel.
At the time the government was observing austerity, the Election Commission’s expenses on foreign travel jumped by eight times as compared to just a 10% jump in the cost of domestic travel.
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In a reply to a RTI application, the commission also admitted that it has not adopted the government’s transparency order asking all senior government functionaries to place their travel expenses in the public domain.
“The ECI is a constitutional body and any office memorandum issued by the government does not make automatic effect in the commission and comes into effect only if the same is adopted in the commission. So far as the OM mentioned by you is concerned, it is that the said OM has not been adopted,” the commission said in its reply.
The information provided showed that foreign travel expenses of election commissioners increased from `8.33 lakh in 2008-09 to `62.98 lakh. During the same period, the money spent on travelling within India increased from `63.86 lakh to 70.80 lakh.
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Former chief election commissioner S Y Quraishi travelled abroad the most with 23 trips. The RTI reply states that Quraishi’s foreign trips were equal to the total foreign travels of his predecessors — Navin B Chawla and N Gopalaswami — and his successor — V S Sampath.
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Former chief election commissioner S Y Quraishi travelled abroad the most with 23 trips. The RTI reply states that Quraishi’s foreign trips were equal to the total foreign travels of his predecessors — Navin B Chawla and N Gopalaswami — and his successor — V S Sampath.
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Akshay Rout, director general (communication), with 18 foreign trips gave Quraishi tough competition. These visits were mostly with election commissioners and were mostly in relation to exchange on ideas on conducting polls.
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.
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