Eleven Hundred Crore, Twenty-Six Paragraphs

Blitz India Business

NEW DELHI: Twenty-six audit observations on the Indian Railways were laid before Parliament this month. Add up every rupee figure the auditor names in them and the total is ₹1,130.92 crore. Five paragraphs account for nearly two-thirds of it.

Audit Report No. 14 of 2026, Union Government (Railways) Compliance Audit Report, of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, was laid on the tables of the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha on 12 August 2026; the auditor’s press release is dated 13 August 2026. It contains 26 audit observations arising from test audit for the period up to FY 2023-24, with information for later periods included where needed to update the status of an observation.

Blitz India totalled the amounts named across all twenty-six paragraphs in the auditor’s press brief: ₹1,130.92 crore. The five largest — ₹259.13 crore at the Centre for Railway Information Systems, ₹168.22 crore in superfast surcharge, ₹105.76 crore at the Integral Coach Factory, ₹93.40 crore at Dankuni and ₹81.05 crore on the Mysuru–Chamarajanagar electrification — come to 62.56 per cent of that total. This is not a report about many small leaks. It is a report about a handful of large ones, and that makes it tractable.

The PSU strand

The Railways audit carries a distinct public-enterprise thread, and the standing instruction of this desk is to follow it. CONCOR, IRCON, IRCTC and RailTel made inadmissible payments of ₹20.54 crore as ex-gratia or performance-related pay to deputationists, in violation of Department of Public Enterprises guidelines. The Centre for Railway Information Systems, an autonomous body, incurred ₹259.13 crore up to March 2025 on Software Professional Allowance, Medical Allowance, Leave Encashment and Canteen Allowance without the prior approval of the Government of India that a Ministry of Finance office memorandum of 15 October 1984 requires for allowances outside the general pattern. That is the single largest amount in the report, and its origin is a forty-two-year-old rule about who may approve a pay element.

On the production side, the Integral Coach Factory built LHB AC and non-AC chair car coaches with space earmarked for a mini pantry without first assessing whether that space was required; the coaches were attached to trains that did not need it, and the auditor puts the loss of earning capacity at ₹105.76 crore over 2020-21 to 2024-25. At Chittaranjan Locomotive Works, the Diesel Loco Component Factory at Dankuni, set up at a cost of ₹266 crore in 2012-13, was closed with effect from January 2018, leaving machinery and plant worth ₹93.40 crore surplus because it was specific to diesel locomotive components.
The Railways audit, totalled

Source: Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, press release of 13 August 2026 on Audit Report No. 14 of 2026, laid 12 August 2026. The total of the named amounts and the share of the five largest computed by Blitz India from the paragraphs in that release. Photograph note, Circular BIMG/CIR/2026/02. No copyright-clean photograph of this subject, taken on this date, could be verified from this session, and the circular bars an old picture, a stock image and a news-agency picture alike. Rather than ship an unverified filename, the desk carries this in-house Blitz data card at the exact point where the picture would run.

Where the revenue side leaks

A cluster of the observations is about charges the Railways is entitled to levy and did not. The auditor records that Indian Railways collected ₹168.22 crore in superfast surcharge from passengers on 190 trains without scheduling those trains as superfast services — recomputed, an average of about ₹0.89 crore a train. Southern Railway hired a diesel locomotive to a private siding on a per-day rather than the directed per-hour basis, and later on actual hours even though the locomotive stayed at the siding’s exclusive disposal: revenue loss ₹48.47 crore. Eastern Railway did not notify Hazratpur Goods Shed as a public siding although, the auditor says, it qualified: ₹19.72 crore in siding charges not levied. Siding charges were also not levied at two private sidings on West Central Railway (₹6.31 crore) and at the Indian Oil refinery siding at Barauni on East Central Railway (₹5.83 crore), and no standard siding agreement was executed with CONCOR at Tondiarpet on Southern Railway (₹7.02 crore).

Where the project side blocks capital

The second cluster is about works begun before their preconditions were met, and it is the more expensive habit. Electrification of the Mysuru–Chamarajanagar section proceeded without an unconditional no-objection certificate from the Airports Authority of India: ₹81.05 crore of unproductive expenditure and a recurring ₹80.20 lakh a month on hauling coaching stock by diesel locomotives. A road over bridge was begun on Eastern Railway without encroachment-free land for its approach road, blocking ₹10.96 crore; road over bridges and limited use subways were taken up on Southern Railway without clear sites, blocking ₹7.81 crore and adding ₹0.89 crore of avoidable cost from level crossings kept in operation. ₹63.87 crore remained unrealised from the Government of Jharkhand towards the state’s share of road over bridge and under bridge costs. And a bridge on the Araria–Galgalia new line had to be dismantled and rebuilt: ₹14.12 crore wasted.

What the desk could not establish

Written from the Comptroller and Auditor General’s own press release on the tabled report. The tabled volume, carrying the Ministry of Railways’ replies to each paragraph, was not reachable from this session. The paragraph numbers used above are those printed in the release. Nothing here is presented as concluded against the Ministry, any zonal railway or any enterprise, and no individual is named. Blitz India will carry the replies when the volume has been read.

The constructive reading is that these are two different problems needing two different fixes, and only one of them costs money. The revenue cluster — sidings, loco hire, surcharge, way leave — is a compliance-checking problem: every one of those items is governed by an existing Railway Board directive that was simply not applied at a division. A single annual certificate from each zonal railway, confirming that every private and public siding in its jurisdiction has been reviewed against the current directive, would close most of it. The project cluster is a sequencing problem: no electrification, road over bridge or subway should reach financial sanction without the clearance and the land already on file. The Railway Board has the authority to make both of those a condition precedent, and neither requires a rupee of additional expenditure. The Railways has built at a pace this decade that few systems in the world have matched; the audit is a note about the paperwork that should travel with that pace.