State extends foreign travel curbs till June

Jul 20, 2012 - N. Vamsi Srinivas |

Hyderabad

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ban on foreign visits

The state government on Thursday extended ban on foreign visits by ministers and bureaucrats till June, 2013. However, though the ban has been in place for a while now, it hasn’t stopped ministers and bureaucrats from going abroad on state expense. Chief secretary Minnie Mathew, who also heads the screening committee on foreign visits, stated in the orders that the ban would be relaxed in “exceptional circumstances like visits sponsored or nominated by the Centre and official trainings sponsored by the government.”

However, as many as 60 IAS officials have been on foreign jaunts since January this year and the state government has paid for more than half of them. “Except in a few cases, ministers go abroad for personal visits and pay for their own expenditures. The bureaucrats, however, go globe-trotting on official duties,” said a government source. Information minister D.K. Aruna went on a 15-day tour to USA to attend TANA meet and irrigation minister A. Sudarshan Reddy went to Czech to see manufacturing of motors at state expense.

Israel seems to be the favoured destination for the agriculture department as is evident from every agriculture minister, department secretary and commissioner visiting the country to study micro irrigation systems in the past several years. The latest additions to the list were minister Kanna Lakshminarayana and officials V. Nagi Reddy and V. Usha Rani. Mr Nagi Reddy also went to the US and Brazil to study cotton cultivation on state expense.

Officers B.R. Meena, B. Sambob and K. Sasidhar went to Amsterdam, Toronto and Canada on a two-week exposure trip to study master plan preparation for a petro chemical zone. The state claimed that the expenditure would be borne by the consultant, Lea Associates, conveniently ignoring the fact that the firm would pass on the burden to the state while fixing the consultancy fee. Minister J. Geeta Reddy and former secretary T.S. Appa Rao and commissioner Karikala Vallavan went to Abu Dhabi to finalise the establishment of a refinery.

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