CAG finds infirmities in financial management at new IITs, struggling to generate internal receipts

IIT Hyderabad

The eight new IITs, established over a decade ago, are struggling to manage their finances better and are not generating enough finances from internal receipts like fees and consultancies, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has said in a new report. This is making them over depend on the government for their recurring expenses.

"Audit observed that there were infirmities in the financial management exercised by the IITs. The capital outlay had to be revised as there were delays in taking up the construction of infrastructure development,” the CAG report said.

“Audit noticed that proportion of the internal receipts (fees, interest, consultancy works, publications etc.) to the recurring expenditure of the IITs was very low even after having been established over a decade. This forced these IITs to be heavily dependent on Government of India (GoI) grants for meeting recurring expenditure,” as per the CAG report which tok 2014-2019 as the review period for these eight IITs.

The CAG report underlined that delay in infra development due to several factor led to revision of capital outlay – from an initial estimate of Rs. 6080 crore in July 2008 to Rs.14,332 crore expenditure revision in 2019.

“It was observed that the initial grants were to be utilised by 2014, but that could not be achieved by IITs due to delay in execution. Despite delayed execution, almost all the funds received by the IITs for infrastructure development had been utilised by 2019-20,” CAG said.

The eight IITs are in Indore, Hyderabad, Gandhi Nagar, Ropar, Bhubaneswar, Jammu, Mandi and Patna.

In IIT Hyderabad, inordinate delay of three years in utilizing available funds of Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) loan was noticed, which resulted in nonachievement of intended objective of advancement of academic and research activities in the Campus in timely manner (Phase-II), CAG wrote.

Regarding academic programs and research, it was seen that two IITs in Bhubaneswar and Jammu could not introduce the targeted number of courses. None of the eight IITs could attain the stipulated cumulative intake of students at the end of the sixth year. There was a shortfall in enrolment into PG programs in all the eight IITs. Five IITs did not fix an intake for the Ph.D courses while the rest had shortfalls in admissions in these courses., the report mentioned.

It chided the IITs, underlying that the “governing and oversight bodies existing in the IITs did not provide effective stewardship and management of resources”.

“There were shortfalls in number of meetings held by the BoG, Senate, Finance Committee and BWC in all IITs during the five-year period 2014-19. Further, specific instances of lapses due to inadequate working of the governing bodies was also observed in four IITs,” it added.