The Fund That Kept Growing

Blitz Bureau

NEW DELHI: A fund was created so that laboratories which earned money could spend it on their own research. By the end of March 2025 it held ₹3,490.68 crore, and the audit’s finding is not that the money went astray. It is that it stayed.

Report No. 17 of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India for the year ended March 2024, Union Government, Scientific and Environmental Ministries/Departments (Compliance Audit), was presented in Parliament on 12 August 2026; the Comptroller and Auditor General’s own press release on it is dated 13 August 2026. It covers the transactions of eight scientific and environmental ministries and departments — the Department of Atomic Energy, the Department of Biotechnology, the Department of Science and Technology, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Department of Space, the Ministry of Earth Sciences, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy — together with the autonomous bodies and central public sector enterprises under them. It contains four paragraphs, two subject-specific compliance audits and two information technology audits.

A fund meant to be spent

One of the two subject-specific audits examined the Laboratory and Headquarter Reserve Fund. The fund exists, in the auditor’s own description, to supplement budgetary resources and to incentivise laboratories that generate higher revenues. A laboratory that earns keeps a share, and spends it on work the budget line does not stretch to. That is the design, and it is a good one.

The audit found that most of the sampled laboratories, and the headquarters of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research itself, “did not utilise even the prescribed portion of the Fund generated in the previous year”. Balances therefore accumulated, year on year. The accumulated balance stood at ₹3,490.68 crore as on 31 March 2025. Within it, ₹627.71 crore earmarked for innovation-related activities remained unutilised. The audit also recorded unauthorised credit of certain receipts to the fund, delays in the settlement of externally funded projects, and the absence of the prescribed monitoring mechanisms.

Blitz India recomputed the two proportions the report leaves implicit. The unspent innovation earmark is 17.98 per cent of the accumulated balance — roughly one rupee in every five and a half sitting in the fund was money already labelled for innovation and not yet used. And the balance as a whole is 17.45 per cent of the ₹20,000 crore that the Union Budget for 2025-26 set aside for indigenous small modular reactors. A sum equal to a sixth of the country’s flagship reactor programme was resting in a reserve fund whose entire purpose is to pay for laboratory work.

The Laboratory and Headquarter Reserve Fund, as audited

What else the report records

The same report carries other observations, and they are set out here in the auditor’s terms, as audit observations on a tabled report and nothing more. The Department of Atomic Energy, the audit records, did not have a comprehensive policy framework for land and estate management, and had not framed a common land transfer and leasing policy despite directions issued by the Cabinet Secretariat in November 2011, so that practice differed between its constituent units. The International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials procured a laser welding machine without first securing the supporting infrastructure, and the machine stood unused or under-used; the audit puts the unfruitful expenditure at ₹1.52 crore. The Directorate of Construction, Services and Estate Management incurred ₹1.45 crore in avoidable expenditure replacing and repairing elevator components that deteriorated in storage while installation sites remained incomplete for more than seven years. The Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education incurred ₹1.99 crore on a photo gallery at the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, which was not part of the approved scheme, and ₹1.86 crore in excess expenditure on Technology Development Centres from Compensatory Afforestation Funds. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy’s Ladakh Renewable Energy Initiative small hydro projects account for ₹5.07 crore of unfruitful expenditure. The two information technology audits examined the systems of the Tata Memorial Centre and the SAP-ERP implementation at Solar Energy Corporation of India Limited.

What the desk could not establish

This report is worked from the Comptroller and Auditor General’s own press release on the tabled report. The tabled volume itself, which carries the paragraph numbers and the replies filed by each department, was not reachable from this session. Nothing above is therefore presented as a matter concluded against any department, no paragraph number is cited, and no individual is named. Blitz India will carry the departmental replies, and the paragraph references, when the tabled volume has been read.

The remedy the audit itself points at is not more money and not fewer rules. It is a clock. A single annual utilisation statement for the Laboratory and Headquarter Reserve Fund — how much each laboratory generated, how much the rules required it to spend, how much it did spend, and what remains — published alongside the annual report of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research would turn an accumulating balance into working research money. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and the headquarters of the Council are the two offices that can do it, and neither needs a new sanction to begin. In a year when the country has set itself a hundred gigawatts, four gigawatts a year and five small reactors by 2033, money already earned by its own laboratories is the cheapest research funding available anywhere.