Overriding The System

The latest findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) expose something far more disturbing than routine bureaucratic inefficiency in Nagaland. Across departments, rules meant to protect public money appear to have been bypassed, ignored or manipulated. Unauthorised diversions, irregular procurement, fictitious payments, incomplete projects and government-funded assets created on private land point to a system in which procedural safeguards can be circumvented with alarming ease. When due process is deliberately weakened, it creates precisely the conditions in which public money can be siphoned away through fraud, collusion and favouritism. The CAG report, tabled in the Assembly on September 3, 2026, should therefore not be treated as another audit document destined to gather dust. It raises fundamental questions about who approved these decisions, who benefited and why established financial controls failed. The Jal Jeevan Mission provides perhaps the starkest example. A programme intended to deliver tap water to households was implemented without basic planning. Village Action Plans in 34 test-checked habitations were prepared without baseline surveys. Three of five Project Implementing Units ignored Hydro-Geo-Morphological maps while planning 40 groundwater schemes, resulting in dried-up pumps. This was not simply poor execution; it was money being committed without adequate groundwork. Even more troubling was procurement. Material supply was awarded to a single supplier without tenders, resulting in avoidable extra expenditure of ₹288.12 crore. Such departures from competitive procurement cannot be dismissed as technical irregularities. Tendering exists precisely to prevent arbitrary selection, inflated costs and preferential treatment. The audit also found that against 16,288 targeted Functional Household Tap Connections in 34 villages, only 8,251 were provided. Yet ₹21.57 crore was reportedly shown as expenditure for services that were never delivered, leaving 5,851 households deprived. This is where administrative failure crosses into a far more serious question: how can public money be paid for work that does not exist? The NST Central Workshop project in Dimapur tells another story of money committed without results. More than six years after work began, ₹10.61 crore had been spent while physical progress remained only 33 per cent. The State incurred an additional ₹16.64 crore burden without securing the intended transport or revenue benefits. A project can be delayed; what cannot be normalised is continued expenditure without corresponding public value. The Botanical Garden-cum-Recreational Park at Jalukie is even more revealing. Government spent ₹2.87 crore on privately owned land without securing ownership or lease rights. An MoU subsequently gave the contractor-landowner ownership, operational control and revenue rights without Finance Department concurrence. Public money was thus used to create an asset while the State failed to secure the underlying public interest. The ₹13.26-crore Working Women Hostel similarly exposes how approved conditions can be altered after the fact. The approved DPR envisaged government-donated land, yet a subsequent agreement allowed NAPO to own the asset and land. The government also bore costs that were supposed to be borne by NAPO and released an additional ₹3.58 crore. Meanwhile, the hostel remained largely unused. These are not isolated mistakes. Together, they expose a culture in which rules become negotiable, approvals are bypassed and accountability arrives only after the damage is done. The real scandal is not merely money lost; it is a system that makes such losses possible.