Gas-guzzling govt talks austerity, burns crores Bizarre ideas like shutting petrol pumps at night are floated even as the fuel bill of ministers and babus tots up to about 3,000 crore a year in Delhi alone Sidhartha & Surojit Gupta TNN New Delhi: While ministers toy with all kinds of ideas to curb consumption of oil, including bizarre ones such as shutting down petrol pumps at night, it might help if they looked inwards. For, the biggest and most profligate oil consumer in the country is the government itself. Petrol flows like water in the government. Not just ministers and officials of the central and state governments, even PSUs and other government agencies don’t have a limit on petrol/diesel consumption. Procuring any data on the fuel bill of the government is impossible because – believe it or not – no tab is kept on it. Ministries, for instance, club fuel with other “office expenses” (OE), which includes everything from stationery to toilet paper. The OE of the central government in Delhi was estimated at Rs 5,200 crore in 2011-12. A major chunk of this would be fuel. PUMPED UP Let’s look at the use of staff cars by central ministers, secretaries, additional and joint secretaries, and directors based in Delhi. There are 70 secretaryrank officers, 131 additional secretaries, 525 joint secretaries and 1,200 directors. Not all directors have a staff car but many do. If we take the secretaries, additional and joint secretaries, and just half the directors, and give them a modest entitlement of 200 litres of free petrol per month, the monthly consumption is 2.65 lakh litres. This estimate is conservative because in reality, the petrol entitlement is limitless. Even when a limit is prescribed, it’s quite high. For the officers in the Delhi government, a secretary’s monthly entitlement of petrol is 700 litres — enough for the officer to go from Delhi to Mumbai and back eight times a month! Times View The government says there is a need to cut down on the country’s consumption of petroleum products given the heavy import dependence. If it is serious in its intent, the best place to begin is by cutting down its own consumption rather than floating hare-brained schemes like shutting all pumps at night. As the largest consumer, it has the primary responsibility for reducing wasteful use of fuel. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of how blatantly official cars are misused for purely personal purposes in violation of the rules. How about cracking down on that? While they are at it, they might as well take a careful look at whether the limits set, where there are any limits are reasonable. We would suggest in many cases they aren’t and can be drastically pared.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 01:13:23 +0000
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