Gurugram: Two of Gurugram’s three main stormwater drains carried sewage into the Yamuna last year with faecal coliform levels more than 33 times the prescribed limit, but the pollution watchdog failed to act against the violation, Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has found.
The CAG’s Composite Audit Report (Civil) for the year ended March 2024, tabled as Report No. 4 of 2026, examined sewage and sewerage management across eight districts of Haryana — Ambala, Yamunanagar, Sonepat, Panipat, Gurugram, Faridabad, Hisar and Panchkula.
It found that the Haryana State Pollution Control Board (HSPCB) did not impose Rs 902.97 crore as environmental compensation on local bodies for failing to treat 100 percent of the sewage generated in these districts, as ordered by the National Green Tribunal in August 2019.
Untreated sewage in the audited districts ranged from 10.89 percent to 67.38 percent of total generated sewage, and the CAG found that the pollution watchdog “did not take cognizance of these violations”.
It also found that 26 sewage treatment plants and two common effluent treatment plants across the eight districts breached discharge norms for stretches ranging from 396 days to 1,312 days in the worst case.
The HSPCB did not impose compensation for this either, and another Rs 46.30 crore was left uncollected. Together, the board failed to act on Rs 949.27 crore worth of violations.
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Gurugram’s drains
The report singles out Gurugram for scrutiny.
As of March 2024, the area under the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) generated 550 Million Litres Per Day (MLD) of domestic sewage.
After accounting for what colonisers treated and reused on their own premises, GMDA was required to treat 460 MLD.
Its installed capacity across 12 sewage treatment plants was only 415 MLD, and even that fell short in practice, with the plants receiving an average of just 397 MLD a day.
The result: 63 MLD of sewage, or 14 percent of what needed treatment, was going untreated into drains, in direct breach of the NGT’s 2019 order.
Only 12 of Gurugram district’s 16 STPs were meeting discharge norms at the time of the audit. The three main drains carrying Gurugram’s wastewater into the Yamuna – Leg I, Leg II and Leg III – showed average Biological Oxygen Demand readings of 88, 97 and 106 mg/L against a prescribed limit of 10 mg/L, and faecal coliform counts running into the thousands against a norm of 100 MPN per 100 ml.
Two projects illustrate how this happened. At Manesar, the GMDA sanctioned a 25 MLD sewage treatment plant in March 2020.
Tenders failed twice over cost disputes; the contract was finally awarded in January 2022 for completion by October 2023. The plant was finished two years late in October 2025.
In the interim, untreated wastewater from Naharpur-Kasan and Manesar flowed into open fields, which the auditors photographed.
At Jahajgarh, a 20 MLD plant meant to divert 85.2 MLD of untreated sewage from three drains by the NGT’s December 2020 deadline began trial runs only in November 2023.
Even then, only 5 MLD was reaching it because the connecting sewer network was incomplete, leaving Rs 18.67 crore of expenditure “largely idle”.
The CAG noted that when auditors specifically asked the Municipal Corporation Gurugram, in an exit meeting in June 2025, why land for the project had been delayed, no answer was given.
A third case involved 41 “micro STPs” the MCG commissioned in city parks in 2019, to be built and run for 10 years by two private firms.
One firm finished its 20 plants on time. The other, M/s Earth Water Limited, did not, and despite a penalty being imposed in November 2021, the civic body took no further action until an audit team flagged it three years later in November 2024.
A site visit that December found only nine of the contracted 21 plants built, one motor stolen, and three plants working only in part. The report said Rs 20.84 crore had already been paid to the firm.
Faridabad: two-thirds of sewage untreated
Faridabad’s numbers are starker than Gurugram’s. The industrial town generates 282 MLD of domestic sewage but has installed treatment capacity of only 97.5 MLD, 34.57 percent of what it needs. It was actually treating just 92 MLD, leaving a gap of 190 MLD.
Its main drain, the Budhiya Nala, carried an average is biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) of 139 mg/L into the Yamuna, nearly 14 times the prescribed limit, with faecal coliform at 7,891 MPN/100 ml against a norm of 100.
The Municipal Corporation Faridabad (MCF) awarded work on two pumping stations in September 2018 but applied for mandatory forest clearance only a year later, delaying the clearance until July 2024.
By the time it came through, two sewage treatment plants built at Mirzapur and Partapgarh in March 2024, for Rs 196.55 crore, proved idle for want of a connecting sewer line that could only be laid on the same forest land.
The MCF spent Rs 16.35 crore laying sewer lines in Shiva Durga Vihar, Lakkarpur and Dayalpur without first securing land for the treatment plant those lines were meant to feed, a plant whose site had still not been finalised as of October 2025, seven years after the contract was awarded.
And plans for three common effluent treatment plants to handle Faridabad’s industrial waste, first proposed in 2018 at an estimated Rs 539 crore, remain stuck over land and funding disputes.
The state’s own nodal agency said in July 2025 that the Centre’s Namami Gange mission had refused to fund the project for want of money.
The Directorate of Urban Local Bodies told auditors clearances had “rigorous efforts” behind them and work would be completed “shortly”, the same assurance the CAG noted had already outlasted five years of delay.
The other six districts audited tell a similar story
Panipat left 26.35 percent of its sewage untreated. A Rs 64.96 crore sewerage contract ballooned to Rs 215.18 crore without fresh tenders, but still connected only a fraction of households, while just 2.1 MLD reached its new treatment plants against an expected 22 MLD.
Sonepat, which left 22.85 percent of sewage waste untreated, has run a 25 MLD plant at Kakroi at a third of ocapacity for six years due to a faulty sewer line.
Yamunanagar, with 45.68 percent untreated sewage, saw a Rs 99.86 lakh contractor penalty slashed to Rs 41,000 after work was already three years late, a waiver the CAG called “unjustified”.
Ambala, with 47.34 percent untreated sewage, terminated a non-performing contract after 28 months’ delay, then took two more years to re-award it. Panchkula, despite adequate installed capacity, still left 44.70 percent of its sewage untreated.
Hisar fared best, with just 17.23 percent untreated, the only district where treatment capacity matched generation.
Money collected, then left untouched
The audit also found the HSPCB imposed Rs 264.76 crore in environmental compensation on 650 commercial and industrial units across the eight districts between 2019 and 2024 for violating pollution norms, but recovered only Rs 50.50 crore, from 334 units. It said Rs 214.26 crore remains outstanding.
The shortfall was worst in Gurugram North, where 92.52 percent of the imposed compensation is yet to be recovered, followed by Ballabgarh at 81.50 percent and Sonepat at 78.83 percent.
Even the money that was recovered has gone nowhere. Board policy requires collected compensation to be used for restoring environmental damage in the affected areas. As of March 2024, the entire Rs 50.50 crore was lying unutilised.
The CAG also found that HSPCB’s inspections fell 71.93 percent short of its stated schedule between 2020 and 2024. Gurugram again fared worst, with only 2,184 inspections against a required 9,815, a shortfall of 77.75 percent.
What the government said
Confronted with the findings, the HSPCB conceded the recovery shortfall in an exit meeting in June 2025, saying it was “working on it”.
On the missed inspections, the board cited a staff shortage but gave auditors no documentary evidence to support the claim. On the larger question of the Rs 902.97 crore in unimposed compensation, its reply was still awaited.
The GMDA, for its part, said in July 2025 that it had prepared an action plan after surveying the drains with other departments, and that treatment capacity was being ramped up to 977 MLD by December 2028, enough, it said, to handle both the growing sewage load and the diverted drain flow.
On the delayed Manesar plant, the GMDA argued that if the sewer line had been laid by other agencies on time, the wastewater could have been treated at an already-functional common effluent treatment plants (CETP) nearby. Auditors noted in response that the plant itself was still commissioned two years behind schedule.
The Directorate of Urban Local Bodies said the firm building the micro-STPs had gone insolvent and that a new contractor had taken over the pending work.
Elsewhere in the report
The audit’s district-wise data shows the sewage treatment gap is not confined to Gurugram. Across the eight districts, 1,522.83 MLD of domestic sewage was generated, but only 51.03 percent was treated to prescribed standards, a shortfall the CAG attributes to poor planning, weak coordination between government agencies, and chronic project delays.
A separate audit paragraph flags a Rs 6.37 crore loss at Chaudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University (CCSHAU), Hisar, where payment for a solar greenhouse project was released through a letter of credit that lacked the shipping and inspection documentation the tender itself required.
The contractor never supplied the material. A police complaint was held to be “civil in nature”, an arbitration bid collapsed when the firm went into liquidation, and recovery efforts, including a suit filed in Hisar court in March 2025, remain unresolved six years on.
CCSHAU told auditors in December 2025 that 16 charge sheets had been issued against university officials and that the matter had been referred to the state’s additional chief secretary for agriculture, whose reply was awaited as of February 2026.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)