“What gets audited gets noticed. What gets ignored gets repeated.”
Ravishankar Kalyanasundaram
India has never lacked ambition in its public spending. From building highways in Himalayan terrains to launching cashless welfare schemes for millions, the country’s annual budget is a grand performance of intent. It is also, increasingly, an exercise in optimism. What is often missing—worryingly—is a structured account of what the last budget actually achieved, or more critically, where it fell short.
The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), a constitutional authority established under Article 148, is mandated to examine, voucher by voucher, how the nation’s funds are spent. It verifies not only whether the expenditures align with legislative sanction but also whether they honour the spirit and purpose for which public money was allocated. No other institution—neither ministry nor regulator—holds the legal mandate or independence to authenticate the books of the Indian Republic with such breadth and authority. The CAG’s reports are meant to serve as a moral and fiscal checkpoint for Parliament, enabling it to ask: Was public money spent wisely, legally, and for the people it was meant to serve?
And yet, these reports—detailed, data-rich, often damning—rarely make it to public debate. Worse, they barely register within the very forum designed to scrutinise them: the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
The PAC, by mandate, is Parliament’s watchdog, tasked with examining CAG reports and holding ministries to account. But in practice, its bite has dulled. In its most recent cycle, the PAC reviewed only a narrow selection of the CAG’s flagged issues—many of them technical, leaving out critical findings on underutilised funds, procedural lapses, and untraceable expenditures in major flagship schemes.
Consider this: the CAG’s 2022–23 reports included trenchant observations on the Ministry of Defence’s opaque offset agreements, serious fund diversion in the Mid-Day Meal Scheme, and non-compliance in PM-Kisan beneficiary lists. None of these received structured debate or media traction, let alone corrective action.
This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern—one that undermines democratic accountability. What was once a feared audit has been reduced to a footnote in the ceremonial ritual of governance.
It wasn’t always this way. The CAG’s reports have, in the past, altered the political course of the country.
These were not just audits; they were democratic interventions.
Despite the gravity of CAG’s recent observations—ranging from ₹3,900 crore disbursed to ineligible PM-Kisan beneficiaries, to unutilised Mid-Day Meal grains, inflated highway costs under Bharatmala, and ghost connections in Ujjwala—the media response has been curiously subdued. No prime-time debates, no front-page urgency, and no structured follow-up in Parliament. The silence is telling. In a political economy that thrives on announcements but hesitates on accountability, this vacuum of institutional and public follow-up is precisely why the idea of a Chapter Zero—a formal performance review led by the CAG as part of the Budget procedure—is no longer a suggestion. It is an imperative.
For all its ritual and rigour, India’s Budget ceremony remains structurally incomplete. The Economic Survey, tabled a day before the Union Budget, presents a broad macroeconomic outlook, trends in fiscal indicators, and sectoral narratives—often from the lens of policy intent rather than delivery. The Budget speech that follows outlines allocations, tax proposals, and flagship schemes, but offers little by way of retrospective analysis. There is no structured space to ask: Did last year’s spending deliver what was promised?
In effect, the taxpayer—whose contribution funds the entire exercise—gets no feedback loop, no scorecard, and no honest audit of performance. The narrative is forward-facing, but detached from ground truth. In a democracy, where legitimacy flows from outcomes, this is a dangerous omission. The absence of any institutionalised “Outcome Chapter” within the budget documents leaves Parliament without a compass, and the public without clarity. This is why Chapter Zero, led by the CAG, is not a reform in form—it is a correction in function, anchoring the future in the evidence of the past.
Who better than the CAG, RBI, and NITI Aayog to jointly construct this preface to the nation’s financial intentions? The CAG, with its constitutional independence and access to departmental spending data, provides the forensic audit. The RBI, with macro-financial insights and fiscal stress indicators, frames systemic context. NITI Aayog, with its sectoral monitoring tools and policy design oversight, completes the triad. These three institutions—working in synergy—can offer Parliament and the public a coherent, evidence-backed, and outcome-focused review of how money was spent, not just why it was allocated.
Individual ministries and departments would continue to provide scheme-specific updates and delivery metrics—but these must flow upstream into a central editorial authority. That authority, ideally, should be the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, not only because of its credibility, but because it is the only institution with legal standing to review every rupee with independence and precision.
Let Chapter Zero be authored by trust, not by proximity. Let it be the nation’s annual reckoning before its annual projection.
Unlike many democracies where audit feedback loops are embedded into fiscal decision-making, India’s Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) stands paradoxically powerful but peripheral. With one of the strongest constitutional mandates in the world—unrestricted access to data, vast jurisdiction across central and state institutions, and protection of tenure—the CAG is designed to be a financial conscience for the nation. Yet it holds no formal place in the budget process. Audit reports are often tabled after allocations are made, debated sporadically in Parliament, and followed up with limited urgency. In contrast, institutions like the GAO in the United States or the NAO in the United Kingdom routinely shape legislative scrutiny and budget choices. Singapore goes further, linking outcome audits directly to future outlays. If India were to institutionalise a Chapter Zero, it would not only honour the CAG’s intended role but place the country among the most fiscally disciplined and transparent democracies. The problem is not the power of the office—it is the absence of a ritual of review that compels Parliament to ask: What did the last rupee do, before we vote for the next?
The Economic Survey, presented a day before the Union Budget, is meant to set the tone—a diagnosis of the economy’s health and a narrative of reform intent. In recent years, its chapters have become more imaginative, data-rich, and even philosophical in tone. But while it offers economic insights, it stops short of offering a systematic evaluation of how public spending has fared in real terms—scheme by scheme, sector by sector. It reflects the voice of government economists, not the scrutiny of an independent auditor. In a country with trillions in budgetary outlays and multiple unfinished missions, we need more than a survey. We need a structured stock-taking. That is where the CAG’s performance-led Chapter Zero must step in—not to replace the Survey, but to complement it with the necessary lens of accountability and delivery. A mirror, before the map.
This is not about confrontation between the executive and the auditor. It’s about building a feedback loop—a healthy partnership between Parliament, the Government, and the CAG.
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, while designing this institution, foresaw its centrality:
“The CAG shall be the most important officer under the Constitution of India. He is the one man who is going to see that the expenses voted by Parliament are not exceeded, or varied from, and that the money expended is legally spent.”
In today’s world, that should include assessing whether the money was not just legally spent—but meaningfully spent.
We talk about every rupee being precious. But we rarely ask: what happened to the last rupee? In an era of fiscal pressure, trust deficits, and rising expectations, India cannot afford a budget that skips accountability and starts with projection.
Had Chapter Zero been part of our institutional fabric, it could have rung the warning bells earlier—steering the Government away from misallocated schemes, missed targets, and procedural violations. Trillions could have been saved, and many programmes could have been redirected to real beneficiaries instead of the benami accounts they sometimes enriched.
Let us not wait for the next scandal or fiscal failure to demand reform. Let the budget begin with the voice of the people’s money, not just the promise of its use.
As Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer warned:
“Audit reports are like fire engine bells—warning alarms—but we treat them like temple bells, heard with reverence and then ignored.”
Let us not ignore the bell. Let us finally act on it—with Chapter Zero
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