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In 10 years, Badals spent Rs 121 crore on chartered flights, claims Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu
The RTI reply shows that Badal claimed Rs 500 as travelling allowance, each time he travelled by air.The information also shows the Badals clocked almost one flight a day in private as well as state helicopter.
Former chief minister Parkash Singh Badal and his son and ex-deputy CM Sukhbir Badal could well earn the epithet of ‘Flying Jatts’, if the reply of an RTI query is an indication.
The information, shared by local bodies minister Navjot Singh Sidhu at a press conference here on Sunday, has been procured from the state civil aviation department by Congress MLA Sangat Singh Gilzian’s son Daljit Singh.
The information shows the Badals clocked almost one flight a day in private as well as state helicopter. The chartered flights alone cost the cash-starved state a staggering Rs 121 crore in 10 years, an average Rs 1 crore per month. Private helicopters are hired at Rs 1.25 lakh to Rs 2.6 lakh an hour.
The Badal regime also bought a new state chopper, a Bell 429 model, for Rs 38 crore, without competitive bidding, which was later also red-flagged by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in its report. The state chopper rides added another Rs 8 crore as fuel expenses. In all, the Badal family’s outings, including visits to their farmhouses in Balasar in Haryana, Badal village in Bathinda and New Delhi, cost the state Rs 167 crore, if the cost of the new helicopter is added.
The RTI reply also shows that Badal claimed Rs 500 as travelling allowance, each time he travelled by air.
Sharing information procured from the general administration department, Sidhu said the former CM was also sanctioned Rs 7.9 lakh as “time-barred” TA, an amount he had claimed as reimbursement for his flight tickets to America where his wife was undergoing treatment in 2010. “The TA was granted without air tickets or boarding passes,” the minister said.
They not only clocked air miles but their fleet of 51 SUVs (32 of Badal and 19 of Sukhbir) also guzzled fuel worth Rs 14 crore in first 19 months of their second stint in power between March 2012 and December 2013, the period for which information was sought.
“It was criminal loot of state coffers. I will request finance minister Manpreet Badal to order an inquiry into the buying of a state chopper without bids. Contrast this with our government which has spent just Rs 22 lakh on state chopper (in the last nine months) and hired chartered flights only for the governor (twice) and the chief secretary and the police chief that too in view of law and order after sentencing of the Dera Sacha Sauda chief,” he said.
Comparing the two regimes, Sidhu has only presented figures of last nine months of his government. In the 15-month rule, the state chopper had been used by the CM and his ministers. It was also used to fly out state advocate general and former Union minister P Chidambaram who came here for defending the appointment of chief principal secretary to CM, Suresh Kumar, in HC).
Sidhu concocting figures: SAD
The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Sunday said local bodies minister Navjot Singh Sidhu is mouthing lies while comparing air travel expenditure of the SAD-BJP government with that of the Congress regime.
In a statement here, former minister and SAD spokesman Maheshinder Singh Grewal said Sidhu had come up with ridiculous figures of low expenditure on air travel during the last nine months of Congress rule but the fact is pilots and engineers’ salaries alone came to Rs 3 crore every year whether the helicopter flew or not.
“This is nothing but an example of political skullduggery for which Sidhu is famous for,” Grewal said