CAG reports ₹54,282 crore “unaccounted” expenditure by the Modi Govt.

A recent report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, unsettles the quiet grammar of governance. It speaks not in spectacle, but in numbers that refuse to settle. At its centre lies a figure that is less a scandalous headline than a conceptual disturbance: ₹54,282 crore in “unaccounted” expenditure, not vanished but suspended in bureaucratic incompleteness.

This is not a story of disappearance. It is a story of delay, misclassification, and the uneasy afterlife of public money.

What Does “Unaccounted” Mean?

The phrase demands careful handling. The report does not suggest that funds have evaporated. Rather, it identifies 33,973 pending utilisation certificates across ministries, documents that certify whether allocated funds have been used for their intended purposes.

Without these certificates, expenditure exists in a liminal state. It has been disbursed, yet not fully narrated. In administrative terms, this violates established financial rules that require such certification within a year.

But in a broader sense, this is about epistemology. The state knows that it has spent, but cannot fully say how. Knowledge here is partial, deferred, bureaucratically incomplete. The archive is not empty, but it is fractured.

Time as a Political Problem

One of the more striking aspects of the report is temporal. While a large share of the pending certificates relates to recent financial years, some cases stretch back decades, even to the mid-1980s.

This persistence complicates any attempt to read the issue as merely contemporary. Instead, it gestures towards a structural inertia within administrative systems. The backlog is not an anomaly but a sedimentation. Each year adds another layer, another deferral, another postponement of closure.

In literary terms, one might think of this as an unfinished narrative that refuses resolution. The state writes, but does not conclude.

Misclassification and the Aesthetics of Numbers

Beyond the absence of utilisation certificates, the report identifies over ₹12,700 crore in misclassified funds.

This is not simply a technical error. Classification is itself a form of meaning-making. To record revenue expenditure as capital, or to mislabel receipts, is to distort the semantic field of finance. It alters how the economy is read, interpreted, and presented.

Numbers, often imagined as neutral, here reveal their rhetorical function. They do not merely reflect reality. They produce it. A budget is not just a document of spending. It is a narrative about priorities, competence, and control. When categories blur, that narrative becomes unstable.

The Problem of “Minor Head 800”

The report’s critique of the omnibus accounting category known as “Minor Head 800” is particularly telling. Intended for miscellaneous entries, it has increasingly become a primary repository for both receipts and expenditure.

More than half of certain transactions have been routed through this category. The effect is not merely technical opacity. It is conceptual dilution.

“Other” is not a category that explains. It absorbs. It allows the system to function while withholding clarity. In this sense, Minor Head 800 operates almost like a narrative ellipsis. Something is there, but it is not fully articulated.

Gaps, Transfers, and the Question of Trust

The report also flags irregularities such as incomplete transfers of cess funds to designated reserves and discrepancies in financial balances, including large unreconciled amounts.

These details may appear granular, yet they accumulate into a broader question of trust. Public finance operates on a tacit contract. Citizens do not track every rupee, but they assume the existence of systems that do. When those systems falter, even procedurally, the legitimacy of the fiscal narrative weakens.

This is not necessarily about intent. It is about perception. And perception, in democratic contexts, carries its own weight.

Bureaucracy and the Limits of Control

It is tempting to read such findings as evidence of failure. That would be too simple. What emerges instead is a picture of bureaucracy as a vast, imperfect machine, one that struggles to synchronise its own processes.

Financial governance requires coordination across ministries, departments, and agencies. The delay in certificates, the misclassification of funds, the reliance on omnibus categories all point to systemic strain rather than isolated breakdown.

The state appears less as a monolithic actor and more as a dispersed network of practices, each with its own rhythms and lapses.

Accounting as Narrative

What this episode ultimately foregrounds is the narrative dimension of accounting. Budgets and audits are not merely technical exercises. They are stories the state tells about itself.

The ₹54,282 crore figure unsettles that story, not because it proves absence, but because it exposes incompleteness. It reminds us that governance is not only about action but about articulation. To spend is one thing. To account is another.

In that gap between expenditure and explanation lies a quiet but significant tension. It is here, in the unresolved space of pending certificates and misclassified entries, that the politics of visibility takes shape.

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