Government officials eyeing foreign junkets to beat the summer heat in colder climes in Europe and North America are in for a shock. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee wants just one official to represent India in overseas engagements of a routine nature. The move is part of an austerity drive to check government expenditure.
?I have noticed that delegations consisting of two or more officers are being deputed for attending meetings, international conferences and seminars. This practice should be discontinued and only one officer with suitable seniority should be deputed for participation in such events,? Mukherjee wrote to all departments in the ministry.
On Wednesday, Mukherjee will lead a delegation including RBI governor D Subbarao and economic affairs secretary R Gopalan to the IMF spring meeting at Washington. Besides attending IMF and G20 meetings, the officers will also meet US treasury department officials and businessmen.
A finance ministry official said though Mukherjee?s order applies only to his own ministry, it would act as moral pressure on other ministries and departments. Others have also been asked to emulate the order, he said.
Mukherjee has also decided to reject a number of pending requests for foreign deputation, as it wants to use officials from its enlarged network of Customs Overseas Intelligence Network and Income Tax Overseas Units to take up work in overseas locations.
The clampdown followed reports of officials in many large delegations using such visits as holiday opportunities rather than doing serious work, inflating expenses and wasting official resources. Limiting the delegation size is considered a small step to realise a larger goal.
In a communication to ministries and departments last July, the finance ministry had instituted a ban on holding seminars and conferences in five-star hotels and told foreign travels would be undertaken only in necessary and unavoidable cases. Earlier, after the 2008 meltdown, the government had asked ministers to fly only economy class.
The government is under pressure to cut expenditure as the country?s fiscal deficit (the gap between total income and expenditure) is likely to remain high at 5.1% after touching 5.9% of GDP in 2011-12. Lower tax revenues and poor disinvestment receipts have pushed up the government’s fiscal deficit.