Blitz India Business
NEW DELHI: The Laboratory and Headquarter Reserve Fund held ₹3,490.68 crore on 31 March 2025. A fund of that size does not accumulate unless the laboratories feeding it are selling something, and that is the first fact a business reader should take from Report No. 17 of 2026. The second is that ₹627.71 crore of the balance — 17.98 per cent, computed at this desk — was money already earmarked for innovation and still unspent.
The Fund was created to supplement budgetary resources and to reward laboratories that generate higher revenue. Audit observed that most sampled laboratories, and the Council’s headquarters, did not use even the prescribed portion of the previous year’s generation, so balances kept building; it also recorded unauthorised credit of certain receipts, delays in settling externally funded projects, and the absence of prescribed monitoring.
For the public-sector reader the report carries a second strand. In its information-technology audit of Solar Energy Corporation of India Limited, the auditor records that the SAP-ERP system, intended for automation, transparency and operational efficiency, had several critical functionalities and modules unimplemented or only partly 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 in user access controls, change management, cyber security, backup and business continuity. Separately, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy’s Ladakh Renewable Energy Initiative small hydro projects are recorded as ₹5.07 crore of unfruitful expenditure on account of inadequate planning and implementation.
A constructive suggestion. A single published table — earned, prescribed portion, drawn, balance, laboratory by laboratory, once a year — would supply the monitoring the auditor found missing, from records that already exist.
An account of the auditor’s own finding and of the remedy. No motive is imputed and no individual is named as responsible.
What India gains: lease income, tax and legal work retained onshore instead of paid abroad; reference standards bought in rupees instead of euros; and research money already earned put back to work without a rupee of fresh taxation.