Bills of fare

If the honourable sports minister had hired a taxi and ridden it around the country-side for all 24 hours of the day, she/he still would not have incurred a bill of Rs 98,230 for the ride. But so innovative are the accounting processes of the Sports Authority of India that such bills — which had accrued to former sports ministers like Uma Bharati and Vikram Verma — occasion little surprise. Such little surprise, in fact, that they can be dismissed by a minister in the present government as “financial and accounting irregularities”.

As far as we can make out, “financial and accounting irregularities” are the stuff of scams — whether they be major ones like the fodder scam that has Laloo Prasad Yadav by the short hairs, or more modest ones like the hotel indulgences that civil aviation minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy resorted to during New Year’s last year, the costs for which he tried to pass on to the Airports Authority of India. We need, in fact, to take such “irregularities” extremely seriously rather than pass them off as routine and normal. To go back to the Rudy story, the first statement that the minister made in his defence was to deny that this sort of thing amounted to a misuse of public funds. As he famously observed, “If this is what has been happening for the last 50 years, then all those who occupied my chair should be criticised.”

Which is why we should seize every opportunity to do precisely that. Every time ministers or their flunkeys attempt to fiddle with ledger entries, every time they attempt to pass their personal expenses on to the public sector units or authorities that come under their jurisdiction, they need to be exposed, roundly criticised and held accountable. Indeed, the inflated taxi bills of these former sports ministers are one more reason why public authorities need to be autonomous.