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By Impact News Point | Ranchi | March 2026
RANCHI In August 2007, the Jharkhand government decided to build a new 500-bed hospital building for District Hospital Ranchi. The construction agency was NBCC, the National Buildings Construction Corporation, a central government enterprise. Work began. Then, in July 2013, construction stopped midway. The government had decided to switch the project to public-private partnership mode and appointed IFC the International Finance Corporation as the transaction advisor to prepare the bid document and find a private operator who would complete the remaining work and run the hospital. NBCC was instructed in May 2013 to hand over the inventory of completed work so the building could be transferred to whoever won the PPP bid. No private operator came forward on the terms available. The building stayed as it was partially complete, unstaffed, not operational. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India, in CAG Report No. 3 of 2021 covering District Hospital Outcomes in Jharkhand for the period ending March 2019, found that more than 12 years after construction began, the 500-bed hospital for District Hospital Ranchi remained non-functional. District Hospital Ranchi, in the capital city of the state, was still operating under severe bed shortages between 61 and 88 percent below required capacity across the six test-checked District Hospitals while the building meant to address that shortage stood incomplete and idle.
That is one building, one city, one department. The CAG’s accumulated audit record across Jharkhand’s health, roads, sanitation, and financial management departments tells the same story repeatedly of a state that builds, spends, and then fails to convert what it has built into the services it was built to deliver.
District Hospital Ramgarh is the second case in the same CAG report. The department sanctioned a new 100-bed hospital building for Ramgarh in June 2008 at a cost of Rs 4.89 crore. Construction began. In June 2013 the same month that District Hospital Ranchi’s PPP transition was underway, construction at Ramgarh also stopped, after Rs 3 crore had already been spent. The reason the CAG recorded is precise: corruption charges against officials engaged in the construction work. The case was not resolved. Work was not resumed. As of June 2020, the incomplete 100-bed building was still standing unfinished, and District Hospital Ramgarh was functioning not in a hospital building but in the building of a Mother and Child Health Centre, a facility designed for maternal and child health services, not as a district hospital since April 2016. The photograph included in the CAG report shows the half-built 100-bed structure standing in Ramgarh, frozen at the point where the corruption case ended the work.
Burn units across 24 Jharkhand districts tell the third version of this pattern. The department sanctioned construction of 10-bed burn units with furniture and equipment across all 24 districts in August 2014 at a cost of Rs 1.35 crore each. The construction and supply of furniture was completed. Burn units were physically handed over to District Hospitals across the state between January 2017 and the period covered by the CAG audit. And then nothing. The completed units could not be made functional because the equipment needed to actually treat burn patients’ medical equipment, not furniture, was never procured. The agency responsible for equipment procurement, JMHIDPCL (Jharkhand Medical and Health Infrastructure Development Procurement Corporation Limited), was simply never provided the funds to do so. The CAG found that as of the audit period, the completed burn units at the test-checked District Hospitals remained non-functional. A patient in Deoghar, Hazaribag, Palamu, Ramgarh, or Ranchi with serious burns would find a completed burn unit in the building, furniture in place, and no functioning equipment to treat them.
The drug procurement numbers from the same audit period are more striking than any single building. JMHIDPCL spent only Rs 12.46 crore out of Rs 100.31 crore in state funds allocated to it for drug procurement a utilisation rate of 12 percent. The remaining Rs 87.85 crore was returned to the department in June 2020 without being spent. At the same time, NHM funds available for drug purchase were Rs 52.78 crore but only Rs 40.54 crore was actually spent, leaving Rs 12.24 crore sitting unused in JMHIDPCL’s bank account. The predictable result: test-checked District Hospitals across Jharkhand had between 11 and 23 percent of their essential medicines available during 2017 to 2019. A government hospital in Jharkhand at that time had, on average, fewer than one in four medicines it was supposed to stock. The drugs that were procured were found to be stored in conditions that did not meet basic norms, reducing their usability even after procurement.
The February 2025 CAG report tabled in the Jharkhand Assembly extended the drug procurement finding further. JMHIDPCL had used only 20 percent of the Rs 1,395.67 crore available to it for medicine procurement between 2016 and 2022. Seventy-seven to 88 percent of medicines were not purchased in the period reviewed. The same report found a 66 to 94 percent shortage of medicines in sample testing centres, and a 48 to 67 percent equipment shortfall even in operating theatres of state hospitals. In that same February 2025 report, the CAG recorded that 5,209 utilisation certificates had not been submitted by various bodies of the state government against grants-in-aid of Rs 19,125.88 crore provided during the financial year 2023-24. A utilisation certificate is the formal document that confirms money sent to a government body was actually used for its allocated purpose. When 5,209 of them go unsubmitted against grants of more than Rs 19,000 crore, the public record shows that money was sent but does not confirm how or whether it was spent.
Roads present the same structural failure at the level of project planning. The CAG’s compliance audit report on Jharkhand’s Road Construction Department, tabled in August 2024, examined 80 road construction works across the state. Of those 80, 49 more than 60 percent had time overruns ranging from two months to 78 months. A time overrun of 78 months is more than six years beyond the contracted completion date. The CAG identified a specific planning failure that caused cost overruns in eight projects totalling Rs 37.29 crore: the Road Construction Department had awarded construction contracts without first handing over encumbrance-free sites to the contractors. Encumbrance-free means land legally cleared of all claims, structures, and occupancy. In eight projects, contractors were expected to build on land that had not been cleared. When they reached the portions with encumbrances, work stopped. Delays accumulated. Costs rose. The department’s own failure to clear the land before awarding the contract produced an additional public expenditure of Rs 37.29 crore across those eight projects money that would not have been needed if the basic sequence of planning steps had been followed.
Municipal solid waste management shows the same dynamic at the local body level. The CAG’s August 2024 report on Solid Waste Management across 14 of Jharkhand’s 50 Urban Local Bodies, covering the period 2017-18 to 2021-22, found that of 14 test-checked ULBs, land for a landfill site was available in 12. Construction could begin in only 8 of those 12. Of all 14, only Deoghar Municipal Corporation had a completed landfill site. In Chakradharpur Municipal Corporation, Rs 1.31 crore had been released for land acquisition. Of that, Rs 84.28 lakh was transferred to the District Land Acquisition Officer. The land was never acquired. Since the land was not acquired, the concessionaire contracted to build the landfill could not start construction. The municipality in Chakradharpur had the money, had transferred it, had a contractor, and still had no landfill because the land step in the chain was never completed. Solid waste from Chakradharpur continued to be managed without a proper landfill. Thirteen of the 14 ULBs audited had not promoted in-house composting, which means organic waste that could have been processed locally was adding to the load of a disposal system that was not working.
COVID-19 brought exceptional central funding specifically earmarked for building the health infrastructure Jharkhand needed to respond to the pandemic and strengthen long-term capacity. The CAG’s findings on COVID fund utilisation recorded that of Rs 756.42 crore available for COVID-19 management in Jharkhand, only Rs 436.97 crore approximately 58 percent was spent. Of Rs 754.61 crore released through the State Disaster Response Fund between March 2020 and December 2021, Rs 539.56 crore was used by February 2022. The specific infrastructure commitments that were not delivered included: RT-PCR laboratories at the district level, a Centre of Excellence in Paediatrics in Ranchi, oxygen plants, and prefabricated structures at Community Health Centres, Primary Health Centres, and Health Sub-Centres across the state. These were not aspirational additions. They were planned pandemic response facilities, funded with central money during an active public health emergency, that were not built.
The political response to these audit findings has followed a consistent pattern. After the February 2025 CAG health report was tabled, BJP leader and Leader of Opposition Babulal Marandi demanded a white paper on five years of governance, saying the findings confirmed fears of financial mismanagement. MLA Saryu Roy, whose anti-corruption record in the Assembly is well established, specifically raised the inferior medicine procurement findings and the unspent COVID funds as evidence of systemic failure. Health Minister Dr. Irfan Ansari responded that the opposition was distorting the facts and that the government had worked to strengthen healthcare infrastructure under difficult pandemic conditions. The exchange audit finding, opposition demand, government denial has been repeated across multiple CAG cycles and multiple departments. Corrective actions against specific officials, contract modifications, or verified remediation of the identified gaps have not featured prominently in public reporting following those exchanges.
The vacancy data sitting behind all of this infrastructure failure is the structural explanation. As of February 2024, Jharkhand had 1,67,203 employees against a sanctioned government strength of 3,26,049, indicating vacancies in 49 percent of all sanctioned government posts, according to the Jharkhand Budget Analysis published by PRS Legislative Research. A hospital building completed and handed to a department with 49 percent vacancy rates in its key positions is a building that will struggle to function. A landfill completed and transferred to a municipal corporation without sanitation engineers to manage it is a landfill that will be mismanaged or fall into disuse. The capital expenditure record and the vacancy record are not separate problems. They are the same problem a state that is building faster than it is building the human capacity to operate what it builds.
Jharkhand’s capital outlay has risen significantly: Rs 21,248 crore in 2023-24, a 49 percent jump over the previous year’s revised estimates, and projected at Rs 23,987 crore in 2024-25. That is substantial public money going into construction and asset creation each year. The 500-bed hospital building for District Hospital Ranchi was decided in 2007. The 100-bed building for District Hospital Ramgarh was sanctioned in 2008 and halted by corruption in 2013. Burn units were handed over between 2015 and 2017. RT-PCR labs were planned with pandemic funds in 2020 and never built. Roads are running up to 78 months behind schedule because land was not cleared before contracts were signed. Landfill money in Chakradharpur was transferred to the land acquisition officer and the land was never acquired. None of these failures required new law, new policy, or new budget. They required that the next step in an already-approved, already-funded process be completed.
The CAG’s recommendations across these audits are not complicated. Do not release construction funds without simultaneously releasing equipment procurement funds, so that a completed building does not sit waiting for equipment. Do not award road contracts without a confirmed, encumbrance-free site, so that contractors are not stopped by land problems after work has started. Do not transfer land acquisition money without a system that tracks whether the land was actually acquired and triggers escalation if it was not. Treat utilisation certificate submission as a mandatory deadline not an administrative formality that can accumulate for years so that Rs 19,125 crore does not pass through government accounts without public confirmation of how it was used. These are process changes. Jharkhand has the money to implement them. It built the buildings. The next step is to use them.
SOURCE LOG
District Hospital Ranchi 500-bed building decided August 2007, NBCC construction agency, stopped July 2013, PPP mode decided July 2012, IFC appointed Transaction Advisor, NBCC instructed May 2013 to hand over inventory, no private operator, building non-functional after 12+ years; District Hospital Ramgarh 100-bed building sanctioned June 2008 at Rs 4.89 crore, construction stalled June 2013 after Rs 3 crore spent due to corruption charges against officials, work not resumed June 2020, functioning in MCH centre since April 2016; burn units sanctioned August 2014 at Rs 1.35 crore each, construction and furniture completed, handed over January 2017, could not be made functional, equipment never procured; JMHIDPCL spent only Rs 12.46 crore of Rs 100.31 crore state drug fund (12%), Rs 87.85 crore returned; only Rs 40.54 crore of Rs 52.78 crore NHM drug funds spent, Rs 12.24 crore in bank account; test-checked DHs had only 11-23% essential medicines; drugs stored improperly; bed shortages 61-88% in six test-checked DHs: CAG Report No. 3 of 2021 Performance Audit of District Hospital Outcomes in Jharkhand for the year ended 31 March 2019, presented to Jharkhand Legislature March 15, 2022. cag.gov.in/en/audit-report/details/115562
February 2025 CAG report JMHIDPCL used only 20% of Rs 1,395.67 crore for medicine procurement 2016-2022; 77-88% medicines not purchased; 66-94% shortage medicines in sample testing centres; 48-67% equipment shortfall in operating theatres; 5,209 utilisation certificates not submitted against Rs 19,125.88 crore grants-in-aid 2023-24; female doctors not available in MMUs; 8 departments withdrew Rs 26.22 crore on short contingency bills; 18,011 short contingency bills Rs 4,891.72 crore withdrawn; Babulal Marandi white paper demand; Saryu Roy inferior medicines and COVID funds statement; Health Minister Irfan Ansari response: The Statesman, “CAG Report Unmasks Jharkhand’s Healthcare Crisis,” March 1, 2025, thestatesman.com | Opindia, “Jharkhand: CAG report says no utilisation certification submitted for Rs 19,125 crore,” February 28, 2025, opindia.com
COVID-19 funds: Rs 756.42 crore available, only Rs 436.97 crore (58%) spent; SDRF Rs 754.61 crore released March 2020-December 2021, Rs 539.56 crore used by February 2022; RT-PCR district labs not built; Centre of Excellence Paediatrics Ranchi not established; oxygen plants delayed; prefabricated structures CHC/PHC/HSC not completed: Daily Pioneer, “Covid funds not fully utilised in Jharkhand: CAG report,” 2025, dailypioneer.com
Road Construction Department CAG August 2024 time overruns 2-78 months in 49 of 80 test-checked road works; 8 projects encumbrance-free site not handed over before contract award; cost overrun Rs 37.29 crore those 8 projects: Business Standard / PTI, “CAG finds major irregularities in Jharkhand Road Construction Department,” August 2024, business-standard.com
Solid Waste Management CAG August 2024 14 of 50 ULBs test-checked, 2017-18 to 2021-22; land available 12 of 14; construction started 8 of 12; only Deoghar Municipal Corporation completed landfill; Chakradharpur Rs 1.31 crore released, Rs 84.28 lakh to DLAO, land not acquired, construction not started; 13 of 14 ULBs no in-house composting; Ward Committees not formed 12 of 14 ULBs: Business Standard / PTI, “CAG finds major irregularities in Jharkhand ULB’s waste management projects,” August 2, 2024, business-standard.com
Jharkhand government vacancies: 1,67,203 employees against sanctioned 3,26,049 (49% vacant) as of February 2024; capital outlay 2023-24 Rs 21,248 crore up 49%; capital outlay 2024-25 Rs 23,987 crore: PRS Legislative Research, “Jharkhand Budget Analysis 2024-25,” prsindia.org
