MP CM is 'Helicopter Wale Mama Ji.'

Those magnificent CMs in their flying machines

NK SINGH

Madhya Pradesh Government recently decided to hire a jet plane for a year at the rate of Rs 2.20 lakh per hour. According to a report in DB Post the Government has guaranteed a minimum use of 30 hours per month. It means the Government will have to pay Rs 66 lakh every month even if it uses the aircraft only for an hour.

MP Government Rule for Hiring of Planes/ Helicopters 1999 says that the Government can hire private planes only in cases of exigencies. The rules are clear ---- if the state aircraft is out of order, or it cannot land in a particular area, or it is not available for the next 6 hours, or there is an emergency like natural calamity.

The Government at present owns a fleet of one aeroplane and three helicopters, purchased at a  cost of Rs 152 crore, at current prices. One of the choppers has been put on sale. One nine-seater plane and two helicopters, which can carry six and four passengers respectively, are operational. A team of more than 50 persons, including half a dozen pilots, is employed to look after this fleet. The State Government spends, on an average, Rs 9.7 lakh of taxpayers’ money every day so that our rulers can travel in comfort, and style.

Despite owning such a large fleet the government keeps hiring aircrafts in routine course. This year it earmarked a budget of Rs 12 crore for chartered flights. Two years ago the budget under this head was Rs five crore. Apparently, the decision makers feel that the State is too big and its fleet too small to fulfill its needs.

Like most of his predecessors, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan travels by road only if bad weather prevents air journey. It is rare for him to travel by road. Even if he has to visit Vidisha, an hour’s drive from Bhopal, he prefers to fly. It is not surprising because he wants to be omnipresent. He manages with aplomb to be present at four different places almost at the same time in India’s second largest State.

Take for instance his itinerary for July 2, when the State was creating a record by planting 6 crore trees. In the morning he flew from Bhopal to Amarkantak, by noon he had reached Jabalpur, then rushing to Sehore in the afternoon and finally travelling to Omkareshwar, before coming back to Bhopal to sleep in his bed, covering almost the breadth and length of the sprawling State on the “most important day” of his life. It was a typical day for Chouhan. The brother who walks, “pav-pav wale bhaiya”, a sobriquet he earned for his long marches in the beginning of his political career, has blossomed into “helicopter wale mama”.

It is not easy to keep such punishing schedule. Even his worst detractors acknowledge that he works like a workaholic, clocking 18 hours a day. As a result, his public persona and personal life often merge so seamlessly that it is difficult to distinguish the two. When he wants to attend a wedding in a political colleague’s family, he simply summons the State plane ---- as he did last January when he flew to Mandsaur to attend a wedding in a BJP MLA’s family along with BJP organising secretary Suhash Bhagat. Was the trip official? Or it was personal? All chief ministers have been doing it and no one even bats an eyelid. No questions are asked when he summons state aircraft to attend BJP executive meetings, an affair that has little to do with his official duties.

Now Chouhan has started going for his holidays also by State plane, as it happened late last year when he flew to Karnataka and then to Shirdi and Nashik for his family’s annual outing. Not long ago, he flew to Ujjain with family to pray at Mahakal temple on his wedding anniversary.  He prefers to fly even to Vidisha, an hour’s drive from Bhopal, to look after his farms, or visit his native village in Sehore district.

He is, of course, not the first CM to start this trend. PC Sethi once sent back a plane all the way from Delhi to Bhopal because he had forgotten to bring with him a change of clothes. During Motilal Vora’s regime, the State aircrafts were always in the service of Congress leaders from Delhi to keep them in good humour, pilots working overtime ferrying people from Delhi to different part of the State and even outside it. Madhavrao Scindia would often ring up Digvijay Singh when he wanted a lift in state aircraft from Gwalior. Rulers will be rulers.

Published in DB Post of 16 July 2017

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