AHMEDABAD: The government's reply to a pointed question by a Congress MLA in the Gujarat Assembly has exposed sharp spending gaps across corporations and boards functioning under the Social Justice and Empowerment Department.
The submission reveals large unspent funds in some boards, overspending in others, and erratic allocation patterns.
The minister Manisha Vakil's written submission detailing allocations and expenditure for 2024 and 2025 across ten key corporations shows that while funds were sanctioned in significant amounts, utilisation remained inconsistent, thereby indicating gaps not just in budgeting but in implementation on the ground.
The most glaring distortion emerges in the Gujarat Non-Reserved Educational and Economic Development Corporation, where the 2024 expenditure of ₹657.11 crore actually overshot the allocation of ₹576.83 crore, suggesting either spillover liabilities or poor budget estimation; yet the very next year, the corporation left ₹46.12 crore unspent out of ₹442.16 crore, revealing a sharp swing from overspending to under-utilisation.
Similarly, the Gujarat Thakor and Koli Development Corporation displayed one of the largest unspent pools as ₹51.73 crore remained idle in 2024 despite an allocation of ₹89.13 crore, and even in 2025, ₹22.32 crore could not be utilised, indicating persistent execution bottlenecks in schemes meant for socially and educationally backward communities.
The Gujarat Scheduled Caste Development Corporation also showed a worrying dip in utilisation, where unspent funds rose from just ₹0.89 crore in 2024 to ₹5.48 crore in 2025.
A similar pattern of underutilisation surfaced in the Gujarat Minority Finance and Development Corporation, where over ₹9.13 crore remained unspent in 2024 and another ₹8.17 crore lapsed in 2025.
In contrast, some corporations overshot their allocations, exposing another layer of financial imbalance; the Dr. Ambedkar Antyodaya Development Corporation spent ₹17.02 crore in 2025 against an allocation of ₹11.86 crore, while the Gujarat Nomadic and Denotified Tribes Development Corporation had already exceeded its 2024 allocation.
The Gujarat Backward Class Development Corporation too crossed its allocation in 2025 by spending ₹52.11 crore against ₹48.19 crore.
Meanwhile, the Gujarat Safai Kamdar Development Corporation, though improving utilisation in 2025, still left ₹21.43 crore unspent in 2024.
The Gujarat Gopalak Development Corporation and the Gujarat State Divyang Finance and Development Corporation also showed recurring unspent balances across both years, reflecting that smaller boards too are struggling with absorption capacity, monitoring gaps or delayed scheme rollouts.
Taken together, the data paints a fragmented fiscal landscape where some corporations overspend beyond allocations while others fail to utilise sanctioned funds, thereby exposing a structural disconnect between policy intent, budgeting accuracy and on-ground implementation.