CAG audit shows Manipur spent only 76% of its Rs 37,392-crore budget in 2024-25, with unauthorised debt overruns and welfare schemes left unexecuted.
CAG Audit Finds Manipur Left Nearly Rs 8,928 Crore Unspent in 2024-25, Flags Unauthorised Debt Overspending
Meta description: CAG audit shows Manipur spent only 76% of its Rs 37,392-crore budget in 2024-25, with unauthorised debt overruns and welfare schemes left unexecuted.
Imphal, Sept. 11: A newly tabled audit report has found that the Manipur government left nearly a quarter of its approved annual budget unspent in the financial year ending March 2025, even as the state exceeded its legislative sanction on debt servicing by over Rs 3,700 crore.
The Comptroller and Auditor General's State Finances Audit Report for 2024-25, tabled as Report No. 1 of 2026, examined how the state managed a total approved budget of Rs 37,392.66 crore, made up of Rs 35,531.22 crore in the original budget and Rs 1,861.44 crore in supplementary provisions. Against this, the government's actual gross expenditure came to Rs 28,465.11 crore, leaving Rs 8,927.55 crore, or 23.88 per cent of the total authorised funds, unspent.
The report describes a pattern in which departments failed to use money meant for development while overshooting sanctioned limits on debt-related payments, a combination it links to weak budget planning and poor monitoring through the year.
Development Spending Lagged, Routine Costs Were Met
The audit's component-wise breakdown shows a wide gap between how the state handled its committed obligations and how it handled development funds. Committed expenditure such as salaries, pensions and interest payments was almost fully spent, with Rs 10,356.04 crore used out of Rs 10,972.30 crore, a utilisation rate of 94.38 per cent. This category alone made up close to 59 per cent of all state spending during the year.
By contrast, money meant to be spent alongside the Centre under Centrally Sponsored Schemes fared poorly. Of Rs 11,500.69 crore allocated as the Central share for these schemes, the state used only Rs 3,160.25 crore, a utilisation rate of 27.48 per cent. According to the report, this shortfall meant Manipur did not draw down the full central assistance available to it, limiting the reach of national welfare programmes in the state. The state's own matching share for these schemes fared somewhat better, at 64.98 per cent utilisation.
State-funded schemes utilised only about half their allocation, Rs 2,712.50 crore spent against Rs 5,283.41 crore budgeted, while externally aided projects, largely infrastructure works backed by outside funding agencies, reached 58.80 per cent utilisation.
The audit's functional breakdown points to capital spending as the weakest link. Voted Capital Expenditure, the category responsible for building physical assets such as roads and buildings, saw only Rs 2,704.38 crore spent out of Rs 8,989.60 crore sanctioned, a shortfall of nearly 70 per cent.
Debt Servicing Breached Legislative Sanction for Fifth Straight Year
While development spending lagged, the audit found the opposite problem in debt servicing. Under Appropriation No. 2, which covers capital charged interest payments and debt services, the state spent Rs 9,920.41 crore against a sanctioned amount of Rs 6,191.42 crore, an unauthorised excess of Rs 3,728.99 crore.
The report notes this is not an isolated lapse. Actual spending under this head has exceeded the sanctioned budget in each of the past five years, from 2020-21 through 2024-25, with the overrun ranging between roughly Rs 1,500 crore and Rs 4,100 crore annually.
Under Article 205 of the Constitution, any spending beyond what the legislature has approved must be formally regularised after review by the state's Public Accounts Committee. The audit found that Rs 12,715.06 crore in excess spending from 2019-20 through 2023-24 remains unregularised. During an exit conference held in January 2026, Finance Department officials told auditors that regularisation had not been taken up because the PAC's report on the matter was still pending.
Separately, the CAG identified Rs 47.35 crore spent across four debt-servicing cases that had no provision in either the original budget or supplementary demands, and no re-appropriation order authorising them. These included payments linked to loans consolidated under Twelfth Finance Commission recommendations, National Co-operative Development Corporation loans, and other block loans.
Supplementary Grants Sought Despite Existing Surpluses
The audit also questioned the state's practice of seeking supplementary grants without adequately assessing whether they were needed. It found eight instances in March 2025 where supplementary provisions totalling Rs 501.16 crore were sought and approved even though actual expenditure of Rs 2,847.07 crore did not reach the original budget provision of Rs 6,533.52 crore for those cases.
Among the examples cited, the Community and Rural Development department obtained Rs 97.07 crore in supplementary revenue provisions and Rs 39.42 crore in supplementary capital provisions despite finishing the year with large unspent balances from its original allocation. The Relief and Disaster Management department took Rs 50.29 crore in supplementary grants while leaving Rs 229.94 crore of its original outlay unspent — a pattern the audit said has repeated across all five years since 2020-21.
Flagship Schemes Left Unexecuted
The report singles out a set of policy announcements from the state budget speech that saw no spending at all. Eleven major initiatives with a combined outlay of Rs 239.82 crore, each allocated more than Rs 10 crore, recorded zero expenditure. These included the PM-USHA higher education scheme, Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0 Urban, the central share of Jal Jeevan Mission, the MIND Project at the Manipur IT SEZ, and AMRUT 2.0, among others.
Eight further schemes worth a combined Rs 12.55 crore were cancelled outright, with their funds withdrawn through re-appropriation.
Several Chief Minister's welfare schemes also went unimplemented. Lairik Tamhalasi, the CM's Scholarship for Civil Service Aspirants, the College and School Fagathansi programmes, and the CM's Menstrual Hygiene Scheme all recorded no spending during the year. The CM's College Students Rehabilitation Scheme spent Rs 0.26 crore of its Rs 2 crore allocation, while the CM's Health for All Scheme spent Rs 1.77 crore of Rs 5 crore. Officials from the Finance Department told auditors during the exit conference that the schemes were not implemented because guidelines had not been finalised and public awareness was lacking.
Spending Concentrated in Final Weeks of the Year
The audit found that expenditure was heavily concentrated toward the end of the financial year, in violation of Rule 62(3) of the General Financial Rules, which calls for spending to be spread evenly across the year. Departments spent Rs 12,869.80 crore, or 45.27 per cent of the year's total, in the fourth quarter alone. March 2025 accounted for Rs 7,868.77 crore, or 27.68 per cent of annual spending, and Rs 619.81 crore was disbursed on March 31 alone. The report attributes part of this to receipts themselves arriving late, with 29.06 per cent of annual receipts coming in during March.
The audit also flagged a mismatch between State Treasury records and the Centre's Single Nodal Agency PFMS system on fund flows for centrally sponsored schemes, with a gap of Rs 3,440.39 crore in reported receipts. As of March 2025, the state had not migrated any CSS schemes to the Centre's "Just-in-Time" SNA-SPARSH fund release system, introduced in July 2023.
Among individual departments reviewed, the Police department left Rs 389.04 crore of its Rs 3,365.14 crore budget unspent, while the Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution department left 74.09 per cent of its allocation unused. The audit also found Rs 188.50 crore in Contingency Fund advances across four departments that remained unrecouped at year-end.
Recommendations
The CAG has called on the state government to base future budgets on departments' past spending capacity rather than inflated projections, tighten controls to prevent unauthorised expenditure, review mid-year needs more rigorously before seeking supplementary grants, and set up systems to surrender unused funds earlier in the year instead of at the March 31 deadline. It has also urged the government to expedite legislative regularisation of past excess debt spending under Article 205.
