Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: On 1 September 2026 the Comptroller and Auditor General’s State Finances Audit Report for the year ended 31 March 2025 was laid before the Legislative Assembly of Haryana. It is Report No. 1 of 2026. It had been forwarded to the State Government on 13 April 2026, and it was prepared for submission to the Governor under Article 151 of the Constitution — the article that requires the auditor’s reports on a State’s accounts to be placed before its legislature.
Reports of this class are among the most rigorous documents produced anywhere in Indian public life, and among the least read. This one runs to three chapters. Chapter I sets out the State’s fiscal position — the deficits or surplus, the debt profile, the Public Account. Chapter II works from the Appropriation Accounts and reviews how the budget was framed and where spending departed from what the legislature voted. Chapter III comments on the quality of the accounts rendered and on compliance with financial rules.
One sentence, two ratios
The Executive Summary carries a sentence of the kind that usually passes unnoticed. The cumulative value of certain undischarged liabilities, it records, is ₹2,491.65 crore — equivalent to 0.21 per cent of the Gross State Domestic Product and 7.19 per cent of the fiscal deficit for 2024-25.
The auditor has given one absolute number and expressed it as a share of two different denominators. That is enough. If ₹2,491.65 crore is 0.21 per cent of GSDP, then GSDP is that figure divided by 0.0021. If the same amount is 7.19 per cent of the fiscal deficit, then the fiscal deficit is that figure divided by 0.0719. Neither total is stated in that sentence; both follow from it.
This desk performed the division programmatically. On the ratios as printed, Haryana’s Gross State Domestic Product for 2024-25 works out at about ₹11.87 lakh crore, and its fiscal deficit at about ₹34,650 crore. Because the percentages are printed to two decimal places, each carries a rounding band: the GSDP estimate sits between roughly ₹11.59 lakh crore and ₹12.15 lakh crore, while the fiscal deficit is far tighter, between about ₹34,630 crore and ₹34,678 crore — the larger ratio bounds the answer more closely. And dividing one ratio by the other removes the liability figure altogether: 0.21 ÷ 7.19 gives a fiscal deficit of 2.92 per cent of GSDP, a figure that needs no rupee total at all.
What Two Percentages In An Audit Report Contain
| Parameter / Metric | Details |
|---|---|
| Report | No. 1 of 2026, Haryana |
| Period covered | Year ended 31 Mar 2025 |
| Forwarded to the State Government | 13 April 2026 |
| Laid before the Legislative Assembly | 1 September 2026 |
| Undischarged liabilities, cumulative | ₹2,491.65 crore |
| — as a share of GSDP, 2024-25 | 0.21 per cent |
| — as a share of the fiscal deficit, 2024-25 | 7.19 per cent |
THE COMPARISON — DRAWN TO SCALE
Fiscal deficit, 2024-25 (derived) — about ₹34,650 crore
Undischarged liabilities — ₹2,491.65 crore
THE DIFFERENCE — The undischarged liabilities stand 92.81 per cent below the year’s fiscal deficit, which is 13.91 times their size. Both differences derived here from the auditor’s own two ratios.
BLITZ CALCULATION
2,491.65 ÷ 0.0021 = GSDP about ₹11.87 lakh crore (band ₹11.59–12.15 lakh crore). 2,491.65 ÷ 0.0719 = fiscal deficit about ₹34,650 crore (band ₹34,630–34,678 crore). 0.21 ÷ 7.19 = fiscal deficit 2.92 per cent of GSDP. None of these three figures appears in the sentence they are drawn from.
APPRECIATION — WHOSE WORK THIS IS
The Comptroller and Auditor General of India, for an executive summary that carries its ratios in the open rather than buried in an annexure — and the Government of Haryana, which laid the report before the Assembly within five months of receiving it, a turnaround many States do not manage.
WHAT INDIA GAINS
A citizen who can read one audited sentence and recover a State’s headline fiscal position is a citizen the accountability system actually reaches. India’s audit institution publishes at a standard few countries match; the gain is in the reading of it.
