Key Details
The Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s Composite Audit Report (Civil), Government of Haryana, Report No. 4 of 2026 brings together a performance audit of MGNREGS, an audit of urban sewage management and departmental compliance findings.
Audit area | Principal findings |
|---|---|
MGNREGS employment | During 2019–20 to 2023–24, only 1–3% of households that worked under the programme completed 100 days of employment in a year; 68–79% received fewer than 50 days. |
Delayed wages | In the test-checked Gram Panchayats, ₹2.69 crore in wages covering 794 muster rolls was delayed by 1–552 days. The audit found no records showing payment of delay compensation. |
Worker awareness | Among 400 surveyed beneficiaries, 43% did not know their wage entitlement, 49% did not know the payment timeline and 31% were unaware of the minimum 100-day employment entitlement. |
Sewage treatment | The eight sampled districts generated 1,522.83 million litres per day (MLD) of domestic sewage, but only 51.03% was treated to prescribed discharge standards. |
Underused infrastructure | A ₹202.44-crore sewerage network and connectivity project in Panipat supplied only 2.1 MLD to two associated treatment plants with combined capacity of 40 MLD because effective end-user connections had not been ensured. |
Environmental compensation | HSPCB did not impose ₹902.97 crore on defaulting local authorities and departments for untreated sewage. Separately, ₹214.26 crore already imposed on commercial and industrial units remained unrecovered. |
Financial controls | The CAG identified suspected embezzlement of ₹57.46 crore through unauthorised allocations and withdrawals involving a fraudulent sanction letter and allegedly misused official credentials. |
Audit follow-up | 26,651 audit paragraphs across 8,135 Inspection Reports remained unresolved as of March 2024. Recovery action involving ₹1,961.17 crore from 33 earlier audit paragraphs was pending as of March 2025. |
Employment Was Provided, but the 100-Day Guarantee Rarely Materialised
MGNREGS guarantees up to 100 days of wage employment to rural households whose adult members demand unskilled work. Haryana’s data show a substantial gap between participation and receipt of the full entitlement.
Across the five audited years, 74% of working households received fewer than 50 days of employment in aggregate, while only 2% completed 100 days. This does not by itself establish that every household sought the full entitlement, since work under MGNREGS is demand-driven. It nevertheless shows that the programme was delivering relatively short periods of employment to most participating households.
The audit also found shortcomings in labour-budget preparation, record maintenance and community participation. Works were added or removed at the block level without proposals from the relevant Gram Panchayats, weakening the bottom-up planning process envisaged under the programme.
Wage Delays Weakened a Statutory Worker Protection
The wage-payment findings are significant because timely payment is integral to MGNREGS—not an ancillary administrative target. In the sampled Gram Panchayats, payments worth ₹2.69 crore were delayed by as much as 552 days.
MGNREGS provides for compensation when wages are delayed beyond the prescribed period. The absence of documentation showing such compensation meant that workers could face both delayed income and failure of the mechanism intended to remedy that delay.
Weak awareness compounded this problem. If workers do not know their wage entitlement, payment deadline or right to 100 days of work, they are less able to demand employment, identify delayed payments or seek redress. The audit linked these gaps to the absence of a systematic State-, district- and block-level information and communication plan.
Haryana Had Treatment Capacity, but Sewage Was Not Reaching or Meeting Standards
In the eight sampled districts, only 777.06 MLD of the 1,522.83 MLD generated was treated effectively. Another 489.47 MLD remained untreated, while treatment facilities handling 256.30 MLD did not comply with discharge standards.
The findings expose two different problems. Some districts lacked sufficient treatment capacity; elsewhere, available infrastructure was underused because sewer networks and household connections were incomplete. Panipat illustrates the latter: substantial expenditure on a sewerage network did not translate into adequate flows reaching the associated treatment plants.
Enforcement was also weak. Besides ₹902.97 crore not imposed on defaulting public authorities, the audit found ₹214.26 crore—around 81% of compensation imposed on commercial and industrial units—still unrecovered. This reduced the deterrent value of environmental penalties and constrained the funds available for remedial action.
Control Failures Extended Beyond Service Delivery
The report’s financial findings point to weaknesses in basic administrative safeguards. The CAG described withdrawals of ₹57.46 crore during 2023–24 and 2024–25 up to January 2025 as suspected embezzlement. The transactions involved unauthorised budget allocations, payments without work orders or supporting documents, and failures across directorate, district, block and treasury levels.
The wider backlog of unresolved audit observations suggests that these were not isolated follow-up problems. When 26,651 audit paragraphs remain unsettled, the value of audit depends on whether departments assign responsibility, recover losses and correct the underlying controls.
Policy Relevance
For Haryana, the report connects failures that are often treated separately: worker entitlements, infrastructure use, regulatory enforcement and financial controls.
MGNREGS performance cannot be judged only by registrations or total person-days. Monitoring must also show how many households demanded work, received it within the required period, completed substantial days of employment and obtained compensation for delayed wages.
Capital expenditure requires last-mile planning. Sewage-treatment capacity creates little public or environmental value when household connections are missing or treatment plants fail discharge standards.
Penalties matter only when imposed and recovered. Large compensation arrears weaken environmental accountability and reduce the financial consequences of continuing violations.
The suspected embezzlement finding makes access controls, authenticated approvals and treasury verification immediate governance concerns. Haryana introduced two-factor authentication in February 2025, but the larger test is whether responsibility is fixed and unauthorised payments are recovered.
Follow the Full CAG Report here: Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on Composite Audit Report--Civil for the year ended March 2024 (Government of Haryana Report No. 4 of 2026)