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| Farooq ushers Cabinet out of austerity | | | ABID SHAH
EARLY TIMES REPORT
NEW DELHI, Mar 14: Union Minister for Non-Conventional Energy Farooq Abdullah is being credited with helping in signaling an end to nearly six-month-long Finance Ministry-led austerity drive that curtailed expenses on travel and stay of even Cabinet Ministers while being on domestic as well as foreign visits. Now this is going to be over with the end of this month.
A prominent newspaper here reported today the end of the austerity drive even as Abdullah is on a tour abroad.
Yet since the beginning of September last year a strict control on expenses by Central Minister has been on which Abdullah opposed since the beginning by saying that he was "old and tall and, thus, could barely fit" in the economy class of an aircraft.
And last month when the Minister attended the Budget meeting of the Cabinet he asked the Cabinet Secretary as to when the austerity going to be lifted. KM Chandrashekhar told visibly amused Cabinet members by Abdullah's question to wait until the fiscal year came to an end.
Yet the newspaper says that the Government could save as much as a whopping Rs 2,000 crores through its austerity drive though in certain special cases Ministers could avoid this by taking prior permission from Prime Minister's Office.
Abdullah has never stopped from throwing surprises through the period of austerity. Once he hailed a taxi at Kolkata airport and whizzed through the streets of the Capital of the Eastern State to see ailing Communist patriarch Jyoti Basu who soon after this passed away.
Beating the protocol could be his forte but Farooq Abdullah has been able to win the secret admiration of colleagues and peers. And those not as fortunate as to be members of the Union Cabinet like the bureaucrat or Babus could well share this since they too must have felt the pangs of austerity through last six months.
The end of the austerity curbs are also seen as a sign of economy looking up once again after a slowdown for about a-year-and-a-half. Since the austerity drive, now in its last weeks or days, was the brainchild of top Congress leaders like Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, some of the Ministers had to go through agonising times.
One such moment came when another Union Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad found Sonia and her mother traveling in the economy class of the same aircraft which he boarded to be seated only in the Business Class on a flight to Goa on last New Year eve.
Now when this all is going to be over, Farooq Abdullah can well be credited for being consistent in expressing his discomfiture about this and also merrily going about his business as usual. Even now he is on a visit to Doha, his second to the Capital of Qatar in a few months time, to open an Indian Cultural Centre over there.
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