Modi’s cabinet is globetrotting too, spends 80% higher on travel than last year

Keeping aside the Whatsapp jokes that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi barely spends a night in the country, the number of foreign trips that Modi and his Cabinet colleagues have taken in the last financial year (2015-16) has cost the exchequer Rs 567 crore. This amount is 80% more than what was spent on foreign trips the previous year, and doesn’t include the sum of Rs 500 crore that his bureaucrats spend on their travel each year on an average.

This travel bill of the Cabinet and the PM includes the expenditure on travel by ministers, ministers of state and ex-PMs and the aircraft used by VVIPs, including the PM, President and Vice-President.

At the beginning of the 2015-16 fiscal, the budget estimated this sum to be Rs 269 crore, however, the revised estimates have shown the amount to be Rs 567 crore. Other than this, the total tour expenditure of bureaucrats in the three years up to 2014-15 was over Rs 1,500 crore.

The last government’s cabinet and former PM Manmohan Singh spent almost Rs 1,500 crore on travel between 2009-10 and 2013-14, in comparison to which the travel bill of the NDA government has already been estimated to be Rs 1,140 crore.

To keep things under control, Modi has pledged that he would be cutting down on his foreign trips expenditure by over 54% in the next financial year, maintaining a balance with the level of UPA government's expenditure towards the end of its term.

Even though Modi’s Cabinet has a lesser number of members (64) as compared to UPA's 75, his ministers have got 25% more salaries last year as compared to 2013-14. Other than this, their allowances were also respectively increased by 8% and stood at Rs 10.20 crore.

Another interesting fact about these travel bills is that every year, the finance ministry announces a 10% cut in non-plan expenditure, restricting the first class travel and five-star stays by bureaucrats and a cut on foreign delegations of Union ministers, but the restrictions are lifted in the second half of the fiscal, every single year.