Shillong, Mar 11 : Meghalaya Governor R.S. Mooshahary has flown home to Narengi in Assam 89 times in the state’s lone commercial chopper, spending more than Rs 1 crore of public money.
So addicted is the governor to the skies that he regularly gives up his luxury car to hop onto the chopper to travel to places that can be easily accessed by road.
Details on the helicopter service, accessed by The Telegraph through RTI, threw up a series of figures on the use of a facility that costs other citizens Rs 1,700 per trip from Shillong to Tura and vice versa, Rs 1,500 for Guwahati-Tura and Rs 1,200 for a Guwahati-Shillong sortie.
In the past two years, Mooshahary has taken 132 rides on the helicopter meant specifically to ease people’s journey from Shillong to Tura and vice-versa — a two-day drive — and other inaccessible parts of the state, costing Rs 1.37 crore.
Only 13 of these visits were in Meghalaya.
“The trips undertaken by me are official,” the governor said.
It remained unexplained, though, why he chose to land at the army helipad at Narengi — a 20-minute drive from his Beltola home — rather than at Guwahati airport.
A senior official in the governor’s secretariat claimed that there were very few chartered trips and the governor prefers to travel with other passengers nowadays so as not to inconvenience the public who need to use the service.
A passenger in Tura, however, said on condition of anonymity that he found it difficult to get a ticket on several occasions when the transport department informed him that the chopper was chartered for VIPs.
Between 2008 and 2010, the governor used the chopper to travel to various parts of Assam — including Guwahati, Lakhimpur, Diphu, Majuli, Mangaldoi, Tezpur, Karimganj and Kokrajhar.
Tales of the governor’s chopper use, though, do not end with trips to Assam.
At least once, the governor’s preference for the chopper created a situation where his car was also deployed on the same route on the ground so that he could be ferried from the helipad to the venue.
In 2009, Mooshahary chartered the chopper to visit Jowai for the inauguration of a tourism festival, but asked his car to travel all the way to the Jaintia Hills headquarters, 66km away, to take him from the helipad to the venue at Jrisalein playground just 2km away.
Born to a Bodo family in Gossaigaon’s Odlaguri village, Mooshahary worked his way up to serve in the highest posts in the police, National Security Guard and the BSF. He became the first chief information commissioner of Assam in 2006 after retiring from the IPS and was the only person in the country from the police background to be appointed to that position — an irony that details of his chopper use were accessed using the Right to Information Act.
Unlike the governor, chief ministers mostly travel by road from Shillong to Guwahati, which takes less than three hours.
Other dignitaries, too, prefer to travel to Jowai from Shillong — a one-and-a-half hour journey — by road.
The transport department said the helicopter service was introduced in 1988, run by Pawan Hans, “with the intention of giving air connectivity and help the public travel at a nominal rate so that even the lower income group could avail of the facility”.
That, too, is an irony — considering the frequent rides by dignitaries, spending public money.
The service was discontinued in 1989, after it was found financially unviable. However, it was reintroduced in 1999.
While the ministry of home affairs provides 50 per cent subsidy for the service, the state government contributes another 25 per cent subsidy.
The transport department avails of nine per cent of sale proceeds of the tickets as commission.
