PM Modi's foreign travel bill down by 37.8%

Data shows that the PM’s overseas travel bill reduced from Rs 140.14 crore to Rs 87.16 crore in the second year; data for third year is not available yet.

Nivedita Mookerji/Business Standard reports

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s international travel expenditure dipped considerably in his second year in office, even as his foreign trips continue to make headlines.

The latest data available with the Prime Minister’s Office showed a fall of 37.8 per cent in expenditure related to chartered flights on overseas trips during Modi’s second year in office (June 2015 to May 2016), compared to the first. In the first year, after Modi took charge as PM on May 26, 2014, his overseas travel bill came to Rs 140.14 crore, and then declined to Rs 87.16 crore the following year.  

Expenditure information for the third year of Modi’s term, which will get over next month, is not yet available. But in the third year, the PM travelled abroad fewer times than the previous two, focusing more on domestic trips, including for state election campaigns. Estimates suggested the cost of his third-year overseas travel would be even lower than the second year.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s international travel bills depicted a contrasting trend. Cost of Singh’s foreign trips rose 45.6 per cent at Rs 63.37 crore during his second year in office as PM, compared to the first at Rs 43.52 crore. In the third year of Singh’s tenure, however, the expenditure on his overseas travel dropped by 21.3 per cent from the previous year to Rs 49.84 crore. Singh’s tenure as PM under the United Progressive Alliance rule began on May 22, 2004.

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In fact, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the PM under the previous National Democratic Alliance rule, international travel expenditure showed a steep 82.5 per cent increase, touching Rs 23.09 crore, during his second year in office, compared to the first at a modest Rs 12.65 crore. In the third year, it sobered down marginally by 0.64 per cent to Rs 22.94 crore, an analysis of the data showed.

While Modi’s international travel bills indicated a dip, the actual spend during his tenure was more than double that of Singh’s during the first two years in office, and more than six times that of Vajpayee’s in a similar time frame. In the first two years of office, the total expenditure on foreign travel was Rs 227.3 crore for Modi, compared to Rs 106.89 crore for Singh and Rs 35.6 crore for Vajpayee.

Modi made 11 foreign trips during the first year in office (three of which were by IAF flights), nine in the second year (one of which was on IAF plane) and six in the third year that’s currently on. Singh went on six foreign trips in the first year, followed by nine in the second year and six again in the third year. During Vajpayee’s term, he went on two official foreign trips in the first year, and three each in the second and third year. 

While the domestic travel of a prime minister is covered under the defence budget, overseas flight-related expenses are met out of the Budget head “Cabinet ministers’ maintenance of PM’s aircraft and other charges”.