The Comptroller and Auditor General does not merely audit for the sake of ritual. Every paragraph in a CAG report represents a transaction that remains unexplained, a fund that goes unaccounted for, or a scheme that falls short of its stated purpose. When departments that receive public money choose to respond to those paragraphs either inadequately or not at all, they are not simply ignoring a bureaucratic formality – they are undermining the very framework by which taxpayer funds are held accountable. The findings of the Public Accounts Committee of the J&K Legislative Assembly for 2025-26 make it painfully clear that such indifference has become systemic.
The PAC has flagged that departments have failed, chronically and collectively, to submit action taken reports within the prescribed time on objections raised by the CAG. The consequence is an ever-growing backlog of pending audit paragraphs that go unresolved, unanswered and, for all functional purposes, unaddressed. An audit objection raised by the CAG is not closed merely because time has passed. It remains on the books – a financial red flag – until the department concerned satisfies the audit authority that the expenditure in question was legitimate, properly applied and fully accounted for. Without this closure, public money remains in a state of audit limbo. And without receipts and expenditure accounts being presented, the budget cycle itself becomes compromised. It is difficult to imagine how future UT budgets can be allocated with any credibility if current expenditures remain unreconciled in this manner.
The failings of the Jammu Development Authority, in particular, warrant the sharpest scrutiny. The CAG has identified 2,810 kanals of land under illegal encroachment within JDA’s jurisdiction – a staggering figure. Against this, the anti-encroachment drives that do occur appear calibrated to target small occupants, whilst the large-scale encroachers, those who may have absorbed hundreds of kanals, remain untouched. The JDA was supposed to prioritise action against those who have encroached upon five hundred kanals or more. This is not merely a legal imperative; it is a matter of institutional credibility. Selective demolition that spares powerful encroachers whilst displacing the vulnerable sends precisely the wrong signal.
The consequences of this inaction extend far beyond audit registers. Jammu’s urban development has been quietly throttled by the confluence of three failures: an incomplete Master Plan that leaves the city without a coherent growth framework; thousands of kanals of JDA land effectively held hostage by encroachment; and a near-total absence of new planned housing colonies from the authority for decades. The JDA, on paper, holds significant land assets. In practice, it has not delivered a major new residential colony in recent memory. The vacuum thus created has been filled, predictably and chaotically, by unauthorised construction – concrete settlements spreading without drainage, roads, or civic infrastructure. Jammu is today ringed by precisely the kind of haphazard urban sprawl that a functional development authority is meant to prevent. Then there is the matter of the advances. Rs 7.31 crore extended by the JDA to forty-two officers and officials between 1994-95 and 2006-07 remains unrecovered after nearly two decades. It is a microcosm of a broader culture of financial impunity – one in which public funds disbursed without accountability are simply absorbed into the system, never to surface again.
The PAC has responded to all of this with commendable firmness. It’s call for standing audit committees across departments, regular review meetings chaired by administrative secretaries, and strict adherence to ATR timelines is both necessary and overdue. However, the test will lie in implementation. J&K has no shortage of committees whose recommendations gather dust. What is required now is a mechanism with teeth – one that ties departmental compliance with CAG objections to consequences for the officers responsible, and that requires secretaries to personally certify that audit paragraphs have been addressed. Public money is not an abstraction. Every rupee allocated to a scheme in Jammu and Kashmir has to be accounted for. When those funds go unaccounted for, when audit objections are left to languish, the damage is not merely administrative – it is tangible, felt in the stalling of a city’s orderly growth.
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