(From top) Gill. Arjun, Sibal

New Delhi, July 7: Union sports minister M.S. Gill has been caught on the wrong foot on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, gleefully treating himself to the historic Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal clash while his Prime Minister has been espousing austerity at home.

Barely three months into his job, Gill may have grabbed his chance to be among the global glitterati for the finals of the Championships, well aware that the government is in its final lap.

Gill went to London on multiple invitations, of course. From the British government and an “NRI organisation that’s seeking to promote Indian sports in the UK”.

Gill’s office in Delhi denied suggestions that the invitations may have been conveniently timed to overlap with the Wimbledon finals. “Once he was in London, he wanted to see the tennis. The principal motivation for the visit was not Wimbledon,” claimed a senior member of Gill’s secretarial staff.

But that still means he has travelled on public money, something Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has strongly advised his ministerial colleagues against.

In a note sent out to ministers in early June, the Prime Minister had advised members of his council to “lessen the burden” on the government in view of rising petroleum prices and inflation; foreign trips by central ministers make up a substantive, and often avoidable, part of the government’s ways and means expenditure. Don’t take unnecessary foreign trips, the Prime Minister had counselled.

But Gill apparently didn’t think his London trip “unnecessary”. According to his staff in Delhi, such key tasks as meetings with the Commonwealth secretary-general, Kamalesh Sharma, and Britain’s sports minister Tessa Jewel took him to the British during Wimbledon week. Delhi is to host the 2010 Commonwealth Games, they helpfully added.

The sports minister is expected back tonight, officials at his ministry said; they might be taking some comfort in the fact that the Prime Minister is currently far away attending the G8 Summit in Hokkaido, and may have his hands full with nuclear-deal related matters on his return.

But Gill is not the first minister to fly out of India since the Prime Minister’s advisory asking senior government officials — and ministers — to refrain from foreign travel unless absolutely essential.

Education minister Arjun Singh visited Germany for a week last month. The visit abroad, rare for Arjun, was kept hush-hush at the time, and later explained by sources close to the minister as a trip made for medical treatment.

Arjun’s deputy, D. Purandeshwari, who cancelled a planned trip to Canada in deference to the Prime Minister’s advisory, couldn’t resist a “personal” trip to the US late last month.

Arjun and Puransedhwari made special requests to the PMO, explaining their visits as necessary, top officials at the ministry of human resource development said.

Last week, science and technology minister Kapil Sibal flew all the way to Ny-Alesund on Spitsbergen island, only 1200km from the North Pole, to inaugurate Himadri, India’s first Arctic research station.

The Prime Minister’s letter to ministerial colleagues at the beginning of June on cutting down “wasteful expenditure” initially appeared to have had an impact.

In the first flush of the directive, a slew of ministers scrapped foreign trips they'd planned.

Finance minister P. Chidambaram decided not to attend a seminar at Stanford, petroleum minister Murli Deora cancelled a trip to Japan to attend an international energy ministers’ conference, shipping minister T. R. Baalu said no to an official trip to Finland, tourism and culture minister Ambika Soni opted out of a Kuchipudi Dance festival in Los Angeles.

Most lately, defence minister A.K. Antony pulled out altogether of an important bilateral visit to Japan last month, after first pruning down his delegation.

But the enthusiasm for austerity, as Gill’s jaunt would suggest, was too good to last.