सीमा सुरक्षा को मज़बूत करना: हम सीमावर्ती क्षेत्रों में विकासात्मक और अन्य आवश्यक अवसंरचना के निर्माण पर ध्यान देंगे, जिससे सीमा सुरक्षा मज़बूत हो और सीमावर्ती क्षेत्रों की देश के विकास में भागीदारी तथा उनका लाभ बढ़े।

The 2019 Sankalp Patra's border commitment has two objects, and the second is easy to overlook: infrastructure "to ensure that border security is strengthened, and to enable increased participation of and benefits for border areas in the country's development and progress." Roads for the force, and roads for the people who live there.

Only one border stretch has been audited in this form, and it is the Indo-Nepal frontier — 1,751 km of open border across Bihar, Sikkim, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal, guarded from posts that in many cases had no road to them. The project to fix that was approved in November 2010: 1,377 km of strategic road at ₹3,853 crore, to be finished in five years from 2011-12.

The CAG's performance audit, tabled on 6 April 2022, measured what a decade produced. "Out of targeted 1262.36 km road to be constructed along the Indo-Nepal border, only 367.48 km of road (29 per cent) has been completed (surfacing work) as of March 2021."

The more damaging finding is not the pace but the geometry. These roads exist to move troops to border out posts. "As on March 2021, 363 BOPs (81 per cent) were away from the main alignment of the proposed border road" — 125 of them one to twenty kilometres off, sixteen more than twenty — and "no provision was made to provide the connectivity to such BOPs". A border road that does not reach the posts is a road, not a border road.

One episode in Bihar shows how that happened. The Cabinet Committee on Security had approved an alignment running close to the border at Valmikinagar, on the northern edge of a wildlife reserve. A single-window wildlife clearance was available for it. The state department did not apply — the audit's words are that it acted "presuming that wildlife clearance would not be given" — and instead shifted the alignment to the southern boundary of the reserve, "more than 20 km away from the international border". The audit's conclusion is flat: the shift "did not serve the purpose of border road, as it was beyond the patrolling jurisdiction of the SSB."

Then there are the bridges. Fifteen were built in Bettiah before August 2016; afterwards the road alignment changed, and it was not clear whether the bridges connected to the new one. Audit engineers went to look at the three they could reach: "the bridges were incomplete with no approach roads. The bridges remained unutilised (March 2021) as they were not connected to roads."

The procedural failures behind all of this are the familiar ones, and the audit is specific about the sequence. Project reports were approved for 67 per cent of the length, and the ministry "did not ensure that preparatory works such as land acquisition and Forest/Wildlife clearances were completed by the States before approval of DPR". Contracts followed on land that was not clear: work "was awarded without ensuring land free from encumbrance", which produced arbitration, terminated contracts and stopped work on 408.98 km — 49 per cent of the approved length — for up to five years. The memoranda of understanding that fix what the states must do were "signed" ten years late.

Delay cost money. Costs rose "by ₹831.30 crore in 21 stretches", ₹136.60 crore of mobilisation and equipment advances plus interest remained unrecovered from contractors, and ₹36.74 crore of interest the states earned on idle central funds was never accounted for by the ministry.

Two things this fact-check cannot say. It cannot judge the Indo-China frontier, where the Border Roads Organisation has built at a pace this audit does not cover, and it cannot judge anything after March 2021. What it can say is that on the one border-infrastructure programme the CAG has examined against this promise's period, less than a third of the road was surfaced, four in five of the posts it was built for were not on it, and in at least one district the road was deliberately moved out of the reach of the force it was meant to carry. Our verdict is lacks context.