In this season of austerity, one group has decided to stand up against the government's call of cancelling foreign trips.

The Chief Justice of India has rejected the government's suggestion of even reducing his delegation size.

This weekend, Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan, his wife, his personal secretary and 13 others will jet off to Sydney and Canberra for a week-long Indo-Australian seminar.

The journey ends days of struggle between the government and the judiciary, the government as part of its new austerity drive, suggesting that the delegation comprising various High Court and district judges be cut down.

But apart from Justice Dinakaran dropping out after allegations of corruption, the CJI stood said no cuts could be made.

The Registrar General of the Supreme Court sent a letter this morning to the government saying that it was not possible to leave out anybody from the trip as they had been preparing for weeks.

In fact, one of the delegates Mohan Gopal of the National Judicial Academy told NDTV from Bhopal, "Given the nature and structure of the conference, each judge will present a different topic. This size is minimum required for effective conduct of the programme."

The bill for the trip comes to:
About 22.5 lakh rupees in just air fares to be borne by Centre, states and the National Judicial Academy
The TA/DAs is excluding this amount

However, in a move for austerity, High Court judges have decided to fly business class instead of first class and district judges will fly economy for this trip.

The Law Minister Veerappa Moily had mentioned that judges should also take austerity measures but with this move, the judges have indicated that tokenism may be for politicians but definitely not for them.