Three Thousand Crore in Reserve

Blitz India Business

NEW DELHI: Three thousand four hundred and ninety crore rupees sat in a fund on 31 March 2025. The fund belongs to laboratories that earned the money, and its purpose is that they should spend it.

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 Comptroller and Auditor General’s press release on it is dated 13 August 2026. It covers eight scientific and environmental ministries and departments together with the autonomous bodies and central public sector enterprises under them, and contains four paragraphs, two subject-specific compliance audits and two information technology audits.

Money earned, and money spent

The Laboratory and Headquarter Reserve Fund was created, in the auditor’s own words, to supplement budgetary resources and to incentivise laboratories generating higher revenues. It is, in effect, a retained-earnings account for public science. The audit found that most sampled laboratories and the headquarters of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research did not utilise even the prescribed portion of the fund generated in the previous year, so balances accumulated continuously. The accumulated balance was ₹3,490.68 crore as on 31 March 2025, of which ₹627.71 crore earmarked for innovation-related activities remained unutilised. The audit further recorded unauthorised credit of certain receipts to the fund, delays in the settlement of externally funded projects, and the absence of prescribed monitoring mechanisms.

Two proportions, recomputed by Blitz India. The unspent innovation earmark is 17.98 per cent of the accumulated balance. The balance itself is 17.45 per cent of the ₹20,000 crore committed to indigenous small modular reactors in the Union Budget for 2025-26. Put plainly: a sum equal to about a sixth of the country’s flagship reactor programme was resting inside a fund built for laboratory work.

The reserve fund, and what else the report records

The enterprise strand

Within the same report, the information technology audit of Solar Energy Corporation of India Limited examined its SAP-ERP implementation. The company had envisaged the system as an integrated platform for automation, transparency and operational efficiency. The audit records that several critical functionalities and modules remained either unimplemented or only partially operational; that governance and oversight were weak and the steering committee did not effectively monitor implementation; and that core business processes continued to be handled outside the system, with deficiencies noticed in user access controls, change management, cyber security, backup management and business continuity arrangements.

These are set out here as audit observations on a tabled report, in the auditor’s terms and with the auditor’s qualifications. This desk worked from the Comptroller and Auditor General’s own press release. The tabled volume, which carries paragraph numbers and the replies filed by each department and enterprise, was not reachable from this session; no paragraph is cited, nothing is presented as concluded against any body, and no individual is named. Blitz India will carry the replies when the volume has been read.

The corrective point is a disclosure point, and it costs nothing. An annual utilisation statement for the Laboratory and Headquarter Reserve Fund — generated, required to be spent, spent, remaining, laboratory by laboratory — published with the annual report of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research would convert an accumulating balance into working capital for research. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Council’s headquarters can do it without a new sanction. In a year of large research commitments, money the laboratories have already earned is the cheapest research funding in the country.