Telangana Spent 75% Funds For Loans: CAG Report

The CAG (Comptroller And Auditor General) report for the year 2020-21 said that the Telangana government had spent 75% of its funds during the financial year 2019-20 for the repayment of loans.

The report also said that the government did not achieve a revenue surplus in the first five years.

The government presented the CAG report in the state Assembly on the last day of the budget session today.

The report explained the status of the state in detail.

Damningly, the report stated that the budget for the fiscal year 2019-20 was not close to reality.

The report added that plenty of expenditure was done without the approval of the state Assembly. The expenditure of the state government was exceeding the approval given by the state Assembly for the last couple of years, and the government had not regularized the excess expenditure of Rs. 84,640.99 crore in the state Assembly by taking its approval, the report said.

It also said that an amount of Rs. 2,084.03 crore had been spent by the state government without any budgetary allocations during the fiscal 2019-20, and that that amounted to reducing the autonomy of the state Assembly.

The report added that some departments did not return surplus budget in time, that the government had not warned some departments exceeding their budgets, and that the budget was not allocated completely to some departments which spent them completely.

The CAG said that the final numbers showed that the revenue receipts had gone up by 1.11% during the fiscal while revenue expenditure went up by 12.07%. It also said that the interest on loans taken by the state government had gone up by 14.3% during the same fiscal.

Referring to the grants expenditure made during 2016-19, it said that the expenditure was less than 50% of the total allocation.

The CAG report also said that the state government did not take any precautions while taking advances from emergency funds.

It lamented that the state government was not completely following the CAG standards, and had taken loans in excess of the budget requirements.

It added that the discoms of the state had incurred losses due to the non-payment of the state government's share in the Uday scheme.