Click to play videoNew Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh leads a Cabinet of frequent fliers. Almost all his ministers travel to foreign countries regularly on official tours. Some even club their personal visits with foreign travel.
But hardly any of them comes back and bothers to inform the Prime Minister's Office as to what did they do during the tours and what the tours really achieved for the country.
Several RTI applications have proved that till last year while several crores of rupees was spent from the public exchequer for foreign tours of ministers of the UPA Government in the last four years, tour reports have hardly been filed.
"No one knows what our ministers did abroad. For what they have done and how they did it hardly comes on record. It's really surprising," RTI activist Dev Ashish Bhattacharya points out.
Only three ministers in the UPA Government have regularly filed their tour reports. They include Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil and Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz.
In reply to Right to Information queries, some ministries have even dismissed the need to give such a report to the PMO.
Most ministers in the UPA Government seem to believe that foreign tours come to them just as perks for being a minister.
The Ministry of External Affairs have even gone a step forward to insist that the details of foreign tours of their ministers do not come under the purview of the Right to Information Act.
"In absence of such records, whenever there is a change in the ministry, how will the new minister get to know what are things initiated by the former minister and what are the things pending?" he asks.
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