Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: There is a fund inside India’s scientific establishment that exists for one purpose: to reward a laboratory that earns its own money, and to let it spend that reward on work the budget line would never have paid for. The Comptroller and Auditor General has now looked at it, and the finding is not that the money went astray. It is that the money 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, and the CAG issued its press brief from New Delhi the following day. The report covers the transactions of eight scientific and environmental ministries and departments, together with the autonomous bodies and central public sector enterprises under them: 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. It contains four paragraphs, two subject-specific compliance audits and two information technology audits.
What the Reserve Fund was created for
The Laboratory and Headquarter Reserve Fund was created, in the auditor’s description, to supplement budgetary resources and to incentivise laboratories that generate higher revenues. The design is sound and familiar to any research system: earn from contract work, keep a defined share, spend it on the risky idea that no head of account anticipates.
Audit observed significant deficiencies in the planning, utilisation and monitoring of the Fund. 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, so balances accumulated continuously. The accumulated balance under the Fund stood at ₹3,490.68 crore as on 31 March 2025. Of that, ₹627.71 crore earmarked for innovation-related activities remained unutilised — a little under a fifth of the pile, set aside for precisely the purpose the Fund was invented to serve. Audit also observed unauthorised credit of certain receipts to the Fund, delays in the settlement of externally funded projects, and the absence of the prescribed monitoring mechanisms.
CAG Report No. 17 of 2026 : The auditor’s figures, as published
| Parameter / Metric | Details |
|---|---|
| Accumulated balance, Laboratory and Headquarter Reserve Fund, as on 31 March 2025 | ₹3,490.68 cr |
| Earmarked for innovation, unutilised | ₹627.71 cr |
| Avoidable expenditure, elevator components, Directorate of Construction, Services and Estate Management | ₹1.45 cr |
| Unfruitful expenditure, laser welding machine, ARCI | ₹1.52 cr |
| Unauthorised expenditure, photo gallery at Forest Research Institute, Dehradun (ICFRE) | ₹1.99 cr |
| Excess expenditure, Technology Development Centres from Compensatory Afforestation Funds | ₹1.86 cr |
| Unfruitful expenditure, Ladakh Renewable Energy Initiative (small hydro), MNRE | ₹5.07 cr |
Source: Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, press brief of 13 August 2026 on Report No. 17 of 2026, Union Government, Scientific and Environmental Ministries/Departments (Compliance Audit), for the year ended March 2024, presented in Parliament on 12 August 2026.
The other findings in the report
The first subject-specific compliance audit concerns land and estate management in the Department of Atomic Energy. The auditor records that the Department did not have a comprehensive policy framework for land and estate management, and that despite directions issued by the Cabinet Secretariat in November 2011 it had not formulated a common land transfer and leasing policy, so practices differ across its constituent units. Uniform departmental pool residential accommodation rules applicable to all units and aided institutions had not been framed. Audit observed land allotted or retained in certain cases without the approval of the competent authority, delays in renewing lease agreements and recovering revised lease rent, and concessions extended in the absence of a uniform framework.
Two information technology audits follow. At the Tata Memorial Centre, audit found no approved information technology policy, no IT steering committee, no data retention and archival policy and no business continuity and disaster recovery plan, together with weak password controls and the non-conduct of periodic security audits; deficiencies were also observed in the hospital information system, logical access controls, patient registration, inventory and financial reporting modules. At Solar Energy Corporation of India Limited, the SAP-ERP system envisaged as an integrated platform for automation and transparency was found to have several critical modules unimplemented or only partly operational, with core business processes still being handled outside the system and weak oversight by the steering committee.
Four money paragraphs complete the report, and each is small in rupees and instructive in kind. Installation sites not completed for more than seven years left elevator components deteriorating in storage, and the Directorate of Construction, Services and Estate Management then spent ₹1.45 crore replacing and repairing them. The International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials bought a laser welding machine before the supporting infrastructure existed, and ₹1.52 crore went into a machine that stood idle or underused. The Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education spent ₹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 on Technology Development Centres from Compensatory Afforestation Funds. Planning and implementation shortfalls in the Ladakh Renewable Energy Initiative small hydro projects under the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy left ₹5.07 crore unfruitful.
The status of the reply
Blitz states plainly what it could and could not establish. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s press brief of 13 August 2026 does not carry the replies of the departments concerned, and the desk has not reproduced any reply it has not read. Whether an Action Taken Note has been filed on any of these paragraphs, and what the Public Accounts Committee has made of the report, could not be established from the primary document available to the desk, and nothing has been written here as though it could.
What Blitz would add
The land and information technology findings are the ordinary business of audit and will be corrected in the ordinary way. The Reserve Fund is different, and it deserves the attention of the science ministries rather than only of the accountants. ₹3,490.68 crore sitting in a fund built to reward earning laboratories is not a loss to the exchequer; it is an opportunity the system has not taken. Two things would move it. A simple utilisation calendar — a stated share of the previous year’s earnings to be committed within the following year, with the head of the laboratory reporting on it — would convert an accumulating balance into a spending decision. And the ₹627.71 crore earmarked for innovation could be opened as an internal competitive call across CSIR laboratories, so that the money finds a proposal rather than waiting for one. India is not short of scientists with an idea and no line to fund it. This fund was invented for exactly them.
