The report of the 13th Finance Commission report was tabled in the parliament on the 25th of February. This document makes a very interesting read. Howe of over the 400+ pages generally acts as a deterrent. Who has the time or the patience to go through all of that.
Well this is one of the occupational hazards that i have to go through. Yes i am expected to read through and sometimes even make bullet points out of them. a misuse of bullets i must say.
In the process of this reading i sometimes come across very interesting snippets of data and ideas which i feel needs to be spread to as many of us as possible. That is the attempt in the following blog. Please note that this is not a summary of the finance commission report. I have absolutely no desire neither do i have the skill to be able to summarize that mammoth document. What i have done is every time that i have read something interesting i have put the detail down in this blog. so the format of this blog is more like "did you know that ...." actually strike that its more like a Ripley's believe it or not

It was Shocking to read that more than 70% of our Public sector Undertakings have their accounts in arrears, no i am not talking about profit and loss here i am talking about the stage before more than 70% of the PSU's do not yet know whether they have made losses or not. Most of our PSU's are unable to finalise at least one account per year.
The Saga does not end there in one state Audit of PSU's is pending since 1992-93. The worst is of course that the commission has come across PSU's whose Accounts have not be finalised for the last 37 years.

what this actually means is that the state is allocating budgets to PSU's everyear without knowing if the money in the previous year has been well spent. In fact they do not even know if the money has been spent at all.