Visit 8 nations on Rs 2 lakh!

This is not an ad for a travel company, but President Pratibha Patil's incredible foreign trips' bill reports

This is not an ad for a travel company, but President Pratibha Patil's incredible foreign trips' bill reports

President Pratibha Patil managed to pull off quite an austerity drive last year, which would put the train journeys by Rahul Gandhi and the economy class travels by Shashi Tharoor to shame. She managed state visits to eight countries on a ridiculous expe-nditure of just Rs 1.95 lakh.


Austerity drive? Spain's King Juan Carlos I shares a toast with
President Patil at the Royal Palace in Madrid on April 21, 2009. Less than
Rs 84,000 was spent on her week-long visit to Spain. pic/AFP

The details into the travels undertaken by the President were revealed by a response to an Right to Information plea filed by Breach Candy-resident Chetan Kothari.

Foreign exchange

Brazil-Mexico-Chile:u00a0Rs 12,878 Bhutan:u00a0Rs 32,670 Vietnam-Indonesia:u00a0Rs 66,304 Spain-Poland:u00a0Rs 83,399 Total:u00a0Rs 1,95,251

Kothari had filed the application on July 16, 2009, seeking the details of state visits undertaken by Presidents during the last five years, expenditure incurred on each of these visits and who bore the cost of the trips. The reply he got in September startled him.

It revealed that on state visits to Brazil-Mexico-Chile, Bhutan, Vietnam-Indonesia and Spain-Poland, Patil spent Rs 12,878, Rs 32,670, Rs 66,304 and Rs 83,399 respectively. This comes to a total of Rs 1,95,251. The document said the expenses were incurred under the budget head "tour expenses".

Kothari fumed, "The information is insufficient. They have failed to give any break-up of the expenses and the given data cannot be true. How can a person visit three countries with just Rs 12,000, even if he/she is the head of a state?" He said when he had sought similar details from the Prime Minister's Office he was furnished exhaustive data of the expenditure under various heads.

Compare to Kalam
The President's secretariat also provided details of foreign trips undertaken by former president APJ Abdul Kalam. It revealed that Dr Kalam went on six foreign trips between July 1, 2004 and April 28, 2007, on which a cost of Rs 14 lakh was incurred.

"Even if we compare the expenditure borne for Dr Kal-am with Patil, it becomes clear that there is some

The Other Side

The President's Office failed to reply to e-mails and messages, seeking a reaction to the story.

discrepancy and the secretariat did not reveal the full information that I asked for," the 56-year-old RTI activist said.

The President's secretariat also said the expenses of the President's visit are borne by the Ministry of Defence for domestic tours and by the Ministry of External Affairs for foreign visits.

Dissatisfied with the information, Kothari has now lodged a complaint with the Central Information Commission against the public information officer of the Rashtrapati Bhavan "for providing incomplete, false and malafide information".