Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan has spent less than Rs 50 lakh on the 20 foreign trips he has undertaken in his official capacity in the past three years, an RTI reply received by The Sunday Guardian has revealed. Pradhan’s 20 foreign trips cost the exchequer just Rs 4,378,000. The trips spanned 37 days since he took charge of the ministry in 2014. Pradhan’s foreign trips included attending the World Petroleum Congress in June 2014 and the steering committee meeting on the TAPI natural gas pipeline project in Pakistan. He also attended the 6th OPEC International Seminar in Vienna, among many other such meetings and seminars from time to time. His also went to the ground-breaking ceremony of the 1,800 km TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline project in Turkmenistan.
He also visited crude oil producing and exporting countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and UAE, to hold bilateral meetings on oil import and opportunities for investment of such countries in India. The BJP-led NDA government has restricted its ministers from undertaking unnecessary foreign trips and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked his ministers to refrain from going on foreign junkets as was the practice of the previous UPA government.
Ministers in the UPA-II government undertook 751 foreign trips in around three years of governance between 2009 and 2012, costing the exchequer Rs 12 crore in just airfares. The other expenditure incurred during the the trips could not be accessed by this newspaper.