A Utilisation Certificate is not bureaucratic paperwork. It is the foundational instrument through which a democratic Government assures its citizens - and itself - that public funds have reached their intended destination. Every rupee disbursed as a grant-in-aid carries with it an implicit promise: that it will be spent on the purpose for which it was sanctioned, and that proof of that expenditure will be furnished within the stipulated period. Under Jammu and Kashmir's own inherited financial code, that period is eighteen months. The CAG's findings reveal that this deadline is being violated not occasionally, not in exceptional circumstances, but as a matter of routine practice. More than 3,000 certificates remain pending across multiple years. Over Rs 3,200 crore worth of UCs fell due in the 2024-25 fiscal year alone. And in a detail that should alarm every citizen of the Union Territory, outstanding UCs dating back to the period prior to 2019-20 continue to linger in the system - meaning that public funds disbursed under the erstwhile State Government have still not been accounted for, years after J&K's reorganisation as a Union Territory.
The departments implicated are not peripheral to public welfare - they are its very architecture. Education, Health and Medical Education, Power Development, Housing and Urban Development, and Agriculture: five departments that together constitute the daily life of ordinary people in J&K. When the accountability chain breaks down in these departments, the consequences are not felt in Government ledgers alone. They are felt in classrooms that lack teachers, in hospitals that lack medicines, in power infrastructure that collapses under load, in urban spaces that remain undeveloped despite funds that were ostensibly disbursed. The CAG's warning that such lapses are "fraught with the risk of mis-utilisation" is, in this context, not an auditor's caution - it is an empirical prediction backed by decades of Indian public finance experience.
The consequences of this accountability vacuum extend well beyond any single fiscal year. When UCs are not submitted within the prescribed period, the expenditure shown in Government accounts cannot be treated as final. This means that the official picture of how public money was spent is, in a technical but deeply significant sense, unverified. Citizens, legislators, and policymakers are working with financial data that carries no assurance of accuracy. Planning built on such data is planning built on sand. There is also a cascading effect on future fund flows. J&K's persistent UC backlog is not merely an internal accounting failure - it is a strategic liability that risks choking the very pipeline of central assistance that the UT depends upon for its developmental ambitions.
What is required is not another internal circular. The CAG has been pointing to this problem for years, and circulars have clearly not worked. What is required is accountability with consequences - named officers held responsible, departmental heads answerable before appropriate review mechanisms, and a time-bound UC clearance programme that treats this backlog as the governance emergency it is. Public money is not the Government's money. It belongs to the people who paid taxes. They deserve to know whether the grants sanctioned in their name were actually used for their benefit. Until Utilisation Certificates are treated not as an optional administrative formality but as a non-negotiable act of democratic accountability, the question will remain unanswered - and the accountability vacuum will deepen.