The Comptroller and Auditor General of India has raised sharp questions about the condition of the Indian embassy building in Beijing in its audit report tabled in Parliament, revealing that a newly renovated embassy building has become extremely dilapidated and effectively uninhabitable within a few years of renovation, despite the government spending on both the renovation itself, a five-year maintenance guarantee, and a comprehensive annual maintenance contract thereafter. The report also uncovered an embarrassing parallel waste: the government continued to pay heating charges for the old vacated embassy building for nearly a decade after it was declared uninhabitable and stopped being used.
The Two Uninhabitable Buildings Story
The Indian embassy in Beijing shifted its offices and residential quarters for 16 senior officials to a new, renovated building premises in January 2012, vacating the old chancery premises for redevelopment. That much was the plan. What actually happened across the following decade is what the CAG has now put on formal parliamentary record.
The new building, where 16 residential units were renovated for senior embassy officials, deteriorated into what the CAG describes as an extremely dilapidated condition with damaged wooden floors and walls and blockage of sewage and drainage pipes. As of February 2025, six residential units were completely vacant, with embassy officials living outside the premises on rent at government expense. The remaining 10 units were in the extremely dilapidated condition described. The Comprehensive AMC of the new building had started in April 2017. Despite having both the quality warranty and the AMC in place, the building deteriorated to the point where the embassy forwarded a proposal to the Ministry of External Affairs in August 2023 for complete renovation of all 16 residential units at a cost of over Rs 17 crore. As of January 2025, that proposal was still under consideration. Meanwhile the government had spent Rs 3 crore renting accommodation for its personnel outside the embassy premises.
The embassy’s response to the CAG audit in September 2024 stated that the units were declared uninhabitable after multiple wear and tear issues which arose after expiry of the quality warranty period of five years. The CAG’s implicit question is why a building that received comprehensive renovation and then a five-year quality warranty followed by a comprehensive AMC deteriorated into an uninhabitable condition within years of those protections.
The Heating Bill for an Empty Building
The second finding in the CAG report is, if anything, more embarrassing than the first because it involves a straightforward administrative failure to stop paying for a service nobody was using.
When the Indian embassy shifted to the new building in January 2012, the old chancery building was vacated. The building was declared uninhabitable in 2014. It has not been used for any active purpose or service since 2014. Yet the embassy continued to pay heating charges to the Beijing Heating Company for the old, vacated, uninhabitable building.
For the period from 2015-16 to 2024-25, the embassy paid Rs 74 lakh in heating charges for a building that was empty, unused, and officially declared uninhabitable. The CAG audit observed in October 2023 that though embassy offices were shifted out of the old premises in January 2012 and the premises was not being used for any active purpose or service since 2014, the mission did not take effective action to get the heating supply to the vacant building discontinued.
Paying Rs 74 lakh to heat an empty building across nine fiscal years is not a large number in the context of India’s total government expenditure. It is significant precisely because of how simple the corrective action would have been. Discontinuing a heating supply contract requires an administrative instruction, not a policy decision or a budget approval. The building was empty. The building was declared uninhabitable. The heating bill kept coming. The embassy kept paying it.
The CAG’s Pattern of Concern
The two findings together tell a consistent story about the management of the Indian embassy’s physical infrastructure in Beijing. The new building was renovated, warranted, maintained under AMC, and still deteriorated into a condition requiring Rs 17 crore in fresh renovation. The old building was vacated, declared uninhabitable, and still had Rs 74 lakh spent on heating it. In both cases the failure is not of intent but of follow-through, of someone actually making the administrative decisions that the obvious facts on the ground required.
The Rs 17 crore renovation proposal has been under consideration by the Ministry of External Affairs since August 2023. As of January 2025 it remains under consideration, meaning embassy officials continue to live outside on rent at government expense while the question of whether to fix the building they are supposed to live in remains unresolved across nearly two years.
The CAG has placed these findings in Parliament. Whether they produce accountability and corrective action at the Ministry of External Affairs is the question that follows every audit report. The report has done its job. The bureaucratic follow-through is what remains to be seen.
This article is based on the CAG audit report tabled in Parliament, as reported by publicly available sources. All figures cited are sourced from the CAG report. This article is for informational purposes only.
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