Frequent flyer, big spender: RTI reveals govt's Rs 8.9-crore charter flight bill

For 16 years, India's subsequent railway ministers have had access to a mode of travel most officials don't: a chartered aircraft, funded by the public exchequer, for use whenever a crisis hits or for other official purposes. The Ministry of Railways' response to an RTI application filed by India Today has shed light on the scale of that spending: 33 flights since 2007, a combined bill of nearly Rs 8.90 crore, and a paper trail that grows noticeably vague the closer it gets to the present day.LALU FLEW THE MOST, BUT THERE'S A KICKLalu Prasad Yadav used chartered facilities the most in terms of distance, with 12 instances—more than a third of the 33 occasions recorded across the tenures of all railway ministers. However, he was not the biggest spender. That distinction goes to Suresh Prabhu, who used chartered facilities on just four occasions, covering 13 days, but incurred the highest bill of the lot at Rs 3.01 crore. That works out to roughly Rs 75 lakh per occasion, the highest average expenditure among the ministers.In other words, Prabhu spent about Rs 1.03 crore more than Lalu despite using the facility on just four occasions, compared with Lalu’s 12. At the other end of the spectrum is current Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. Despite holding the post since 2021, including during the period of the 2023 Balasore train crash, records show that he has used a chartered plane only once, for a single flight to the accident site, costing Rs 25 lakh.HERE'S HOW ALL THE FIGURES STACK UP:In total, the Ministry of Railways has spent nearly Rs 8.9 crore on 11 railway ministers and ministers of state taking chartered flights since 2007, across 33 occasions and 48 days.FLIGHTS IN TIMES OF CRISES, INAUGURATIONSThe reasons behind the flights fall into a fairly predictable pattern: train accidents, floods, and inaugurations. KH Muniyappa flew to Kanpur in 2011 after the Howrah-Kalka Mail accident. R Velu flew to Jajpur-Keonjhar Road in 2009 after the Coromandel Express derailed. Manoj Sinha flew to Kanpur in 2016 after another accident. And Vaishnaw's only flight, in 2023, was to Bhubaneswar to visit the site of the Balasore crash. The 2008 Bihar floods, in particular, account for a series of Lalu’s chartered flights. That year, the Kosi river breached its embankment near the India-Nepal border, changed course and flooded large parts of north Bihar, triggering one of the worst floods the state had seen in decades.The RTI record shows that Lalu chartered aircraft repeatedly during the crisis. On June 4, 2008, he flew from Patna to Jogbani and back for an "aerial survey of flood-affected areas in Bihar." On August 24, 2008, he flew from Patna to Supaul, Araria and Madhepura before returning to Patna, again for an aerial survey of the flood-affected areas. On September 5, he travelled from Patna to Nepal and back specifically to inspect the site of the Kosi breach. Together, these three flood-related flights alone cost close to Rs 30 lakh. The rest of the flights trace back to flag-off ceremonies, station inaugurations, and foundation-laying events. The paperwork gets thinner the closer it gets to today. What stands out, though, isn't just where the money went – it's how the record itself changes character over time.Lalu's flights are logged in striking detail: one entry describes a trip to meet the families of people injured or killed in extremist violence in Assam's Tinsukia district; others specify the exact river, the exact station, the exact train number tied to each flight. That level of detail thins out almost completely as the record moves into the 2010s and 2020s.By Suresh Prabhu and Piyush Goyal's tenures, a growing number of entries simply said "official" or "various official programmes." Suresh Prabhu's costliest trip, a multi-city swing through the Northeast covering Delhi-Imphal-Agartala-Dimapur-Delhi at over Rs 62 lakh, carries no more detail than that.The only flights that reliably come with a clear reason attached, in later years, are the ones tied to a visible accident — everything else says "official."IAF JETS TO IRCTC-BOOKED CHARTERSThere's also a shift in whose plane is being used. Through the 2000s and into the early 2010s, almost every charter was an Indian Air Force (IAF) aircraft, with one BSF flight on record. From 2018, under Piyush Goyal, that changed – nearly every flight is now chartered through the IRCTC, Indian Railways' own ticketing arm. Goyal's eight IRCTC-booked trips between 2018 and 2020 include a Delhi-Chennai-Mumbai-Delhi run costing nearly Rs 39 lakh.- EndsPublished On: Aug 17, 2026 15:10 IST