PAC grills Defence Ministry over pay delays, unlicensed
Parliamentās Public Accounts Committee (PAC), headed by senior Congress leader K.C. Venugopal, questioned the Ministry of Defence on Comptroller and Auditor Generalās (CAG) report that
Parliamentās Public Accounts Committee (PAC), headed by senior Congress leader K.C. Venugopal, questioned the Ministry of Defence on Comptroller and Auditor Generalās (CAG) report that pointed to persistent delays in pay disbursement for junior commissioned officers. The CAG examined the functioning of Principal Controller of Defence Accounts (Officers) and 46 Pay and Accounts Offices, which manage pay and allowances worth ā¹3,09,975.07 crore between 2020-21 and 2022-23. The audit found that on an average it takes 68 to 80 days to process the pay.
Over six lakh orders were rejected manually without recorded reasons, and 50,646 personnel were denied the Risk and Hardship Allowance because rejected orders went untracked. A special drive cleared 13.48 lakh pending orders but 5.94 lakh remain unresolved. Sudden recoveries The retirement settlement process also came under scrutiny. The mandated Provisional Final Settlement of Accounts was routinely bypassed, leading to sudden recoveries from retiring personnel, including a case involving ā¹3.7 lakh recovered from a soldier for an occurrence six years prior.
On military hospitals, the audit covered 19 facilities and two medical stores depots between 2017-18 and 2021-22. Twelve of the sampled hospitals operate from vintage buildings, seven of them over a century old. A ā¹8,100 crore modernisation plan approved in 2009 was withdrawn in 2018, and its replacement was only finalised in 2021. Parts of a military hospital in Lansdowne collapsed in June 2022 after structural audits were skipped. The committee pressed the Ministry on accountability for the collapse and asked whether officers who ignored 2014 structural audit instructions had been identified.
Members also raised the operation of six hospitalsā On medicine supply, audited depots met only 27 to 43% of hospital demand, pushing facilities toward costlier local purchases. The committee sought a long-term solution for hospitals unable to install mandated effluent treatment plants. The Ministry of Defence said several corrective measures were underway, including a new IT integration module and a draft Cabinet Committee on Security note for hospital modernisation.
The BriefWire