Fast-Track in Name Only: CAG Finds Army Commanders' Buys Took 22 Weeks, Not Two

The Comptroller and Auditor General has put a number on a suspicion that has hung over the Army’s emergency purchasing for years. In a sample of 281 supply orders worth Rs 930 crore placed under Army Commanders’ Special Financial Powers between 2021-22 and 2023-24, the auditor found that an approval step meant to take two weeks took, on average, twenty-two. The report’s own language is blunt: “inordinate and unacceptable delays”.

The arithmetic is worth dwelling on. The rules give the competent authority 14 days to sign off once financial concurrence is in hand. The audited average was 154 days, eleven times the norm. Nor was approval the only choke point. Technical bid evaluation added roughly eight weeks of slippage, and placing the supply order itself added another four. A route designed to bypass the notoriously slow capital-acquisition machinery had, in practice, grown its own layers of sediment.

The second finding is arguably worse, because it concerns delivery rather than paperwork. Under the separate Emergency Procurement route, contracts were to be concluded by December 2020 with deliveries complete by December 2021. In 72 per cent of the contracts the auditor examined, the items did not arrive within the stipulated timelines. Fast-track, in other words, failed at both ends: the decision came late, and the equipment came later still.

Why this matters goes beyond audit hygiene. The special financial powers exist precisely so that field commanders can plug operational gaps without waiting on the Ministry. The ceilings are substantial, at Rs 400 crore for the Northern Army Commander, Rs 200 crore for Eastern, Rs 100 crore for Western and Rs 50 crore for other commanders, and they are calibrated to threat: the commands holding the most active borders get the largest cheque books. Money delegated on that logic and then left waiting five months for a signature is not delegation at all. It is the ordinary procurement cycle wearing a different uniform.

The timing sharpens the point. Since Operation Sindoor, the Ministry has leaned harder on fast-track routes to get drones and counter-drone systems into units quickly, and Parliament is scrutinising how the capital budget is actually being executed rather than merely allocated. The CAG’s sample predates that surge, covering 2021-22 to 2023-24. That is not reassurance. It means the delays it documents are structural rather than the product of any single crisis-year overload, and that the machinery now being asked to move faster is the same machinery that took 154 days to do a 14-day job when the pressure was lower.

The audit does not say why the files sat, and it would be unfair to read motive into an average. But one reading fits the pattern. A commander who signs quickly carries the personal risk of a later audit objection; a commander who lets the file circulate through more desks spreads that risk around. If that is what is happening, the report is less a diagnosis of inefficiency than of institutional caution, and caution that expresses itself as a five-month wait is, on an active border, a form of unreadiness.

What should follow is straightforward on paper. If 14 days is the norm, headquarters should be measuring and publishing how often it is met. Technical evaluation for items bought on an emergency footing should not consume two months; the whole point of the route is to buy proven, in-service or off-the-shelf equipment where evaluation is minimal. And delivery timelines written into emergency contracts need consequences that actually bite, or the 72 per cent figure will simply recur in the next audit cycle.

None of this will surprise anyone who has sat in a command headquarters. What the CAG has done is convert an open secret into a documented finding with numbers attached, at a moment when the Ministry’s answer to every capability gap is another fast-track. The audit’s implicit warning is that speed cannot be decreed. It has to be built into the process, and on this evidence it has not been.