Many centrally-funded schemes to come under CAG scanner

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) will now train its guns on the state executing agencies which are frequently coming under scanner for misappropriating or blocking central funds under various schemes.

On increasing complaints of agencies like ‘nagar nigams’ and district authorities not properly utilising such central funds as alloted for schemes like MNREGA, JNNURM, the CAG has now decided to make a performance audit of these executing agencies on a regular basis. While doing the auditing, CAG will focus on efficiency, effectiveness and economics of all those projects and schemes which are directly or indirectly funded by the central government.

“Till now, the state governments have been reluctant on furnishing information and records pertaining to centrally sponsored schemes where funding is huge. We have now decided to focus more on these executing agencies,” said a top CAG official here.

Recently, Congress had been accusing the Uttarakhand government on going slow on all the schemes where funds had come from the centre. “We have already done a performance audit on MNREGA and found a lot of anomalies,” said the official.

But the official admitted that the state governments are not very enthusiastic on the issue and often did not provide information and records immediately. Recently, CAG tried to make a performance audit of the Maha Kumbh mela where the centre had given nearly Rs600-700 crore. “We faced a lot of difficulties in the auditing of the kumbh records since most of the works were temporary in nature,” said the official.