Introduction

Nearly 43% of relief funds in 2005, and 19% in 2006 were spent without proper verification of records, according to the Comptroller & Audit General (CAG) of India. In another report, the CAG said that the states had diverted as much as Rs.44.88 crore from the tsunami relief and rehabilitation kitty for other non-related expenditure.

Since the CAG is the auditor of government expenditure, who just points out discrepancies, it is left to the Executive to take measures to correct and address the anomalies pointed out by CAG. But, Since the government doesn’t seem to have taken any action on the CAG reports, it is really left to us, victims, to raise these issues, not only to ensure that complete rehabilitation and reconstruction is done in our case, but also that systems are put in place to address the issues raised as far as misuse of funds is concerned.

In the Tsunami areas, we are now in the last phase of reconstruction, namely developmental phase (the first two being relief and rehabilitation). Rehabilitation has already been poor. And now in the development stage, the chance of diversion of funds and resources to non-appropriate works in quite high.

The idea of this backgrounder, is to highlight some of the ways in which “our money” (that is money that has been collected in our name, either in the form of taxes, relief funds, or immediate post disaster contributions from the public) have been mis-utilised, diverted, non-utilized, and denied to disaster victims. This relies on newspaper and CAG reports on the last few disasters: such as floods in Maharashtra 2004-2005, Tsunami that affected coastal states on 26 December 2004, Earthquake in Bhuj on 26 January 2001 and Super Cyclone in Orrisa on 11 October 1999. All the disasters have one common tragedy that is misappropriation of funds.