Blitz India Business
Chandigarh · Haryana’s State Finances Audit Report was laid before the Assembly on 1 September. Its least-quoted chapter is the one that decides whether every other number can be trusted.
Report No. 1 of 2026 of the Comptroller and Auditor General — the State Finances Audit Report for the year ended 31 March 2025, Government of Haryana — was placed before the Legislative Assembly on 1 September 2026, having been forwarded to the State Government on 13 April 2026. It was prepared for submission to the Governor under Article 151 of the Constitution. It has three chapters, and a business reader should start at the third.
Chapter I is the macro-fiscal chapter: deficits and surplus, the debt profile, key Public Account transactions. Chapter II works from the Appropriation Accounts and examines the State’s allocative priorities and any departure from the constitutional provisions governing budgetary management — which is to say, whether the money was spent where the legislature said it should be. Chapter III comments on the quality of the accounts rendered by State authorities and on compliance with financial rules.
Chapter III is the one that decides the value of the other two. A deficit figure is only as good as the accounts it is drawn from; an appropriation review is only as good as the appropriation records. Every ratio a lender computes and every spread a State pays on its bonds ultimately rests on whether departments rendered accounts accurately and on time. This is unglamorous work, and it is the load-bearing wall.
A worked example from the report itself
The Executive Summary records that certain cumulative undischarged liabilities stood at ₹2,491.65 crore, equal to 0.21 per cent of GSDP and 7.19 per cent of the fiscal deficit for 2024-25. Two ratios on one absolute figure, and a reader who divides gets the denominators back.
This desk did the division programmatically. Implied GSDP for 2024-25: about ₹11.87 lakh crore, within a rounding band of roughly ₹11.59 to ₹12.15 lakh crore. Implied fiscal deficit: about ₹34,650 crore, within a much tighter band of ₹34,630 to ₹34,678 crore — the larger of the two ratios pins the answer down more closely, which is a useful general lesson in reading audited percentages. And dividing the ratios by one another dispenses with the rupee figure altogether: 0.21 ÷ 7.19 puts the fiscal deficit at 2.92 per cent of GSDP.
Nothing here is an allegation, and nothing in the report reads as one. An undischarged liability is an obligation recognised and not yet settled. The auditor’s job is to record it, scale it, and lay it before the House. At the stage of tabling, no departmental reply has been made public; where one exists, this newspaper carries it beside the finding, and its absence is stated here rather than left to be inferred. The Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee is the ordinary next step.
One audited sentence, two percentages, and a State’s whole headline position falls out of it. The document was always public. The arithmetic was the missing part.
Report No. 1 of 2026 — Haryana
• Period: year ended 31 March 2025
• Sent to the State Government: 13 April 2026
• Laid before the Assembly: 1 September 2026
• Constitutional basis: Article 151
• Chapters: finances · budgetary management · financial reporting