Dr Priyank Goswami
priyank.policy@gmail.com
A new NITI Aayog framework on urban governance arrives as Jammu and Srinagar repeat the same mistakes they have been making for over a century.
When British engineers built embankments along the Jhelum in the nineteenth century to protect Srinagar’s expanding city centre, Sir Walter Lawrence, the Settlement Commissioner, voiced his disquiet. Restricting the river’s natural width, he warned, would one day exact a price. In September 2014, the Jhelum proved him right, submerging Srinagar in its worst floods in living memory. In August 2025, the Tawi delivered the same lesson in Jammu: the Riverfront Development Project had reclaimed some 23 hectares of riverbed, narrowing the channel through the city, and the river took back what had been taken-different rivers, different centuries, the same failure.
Against this backdrop, the NITI Aayog report “Moving Towards Effective City Government: A Framework for Million-Plus Cities,” released on 25 April 2026 by Union Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, should be read in J&K. Its central argument is not new: India’s cities are governed by a confusing array of agencies with no single authority accountable to citizens for the whole of urban life. What is striking is that this diagnosis fits Jammu and Srinagar with a precision born of a very particular history.
Srinagar received its municipality in 1886 under Dogra rule. Jammu followed under the same First Municipal Act. Over the past century, both bodies have been superseded, suspended, and starved more often than empowered. The Jammu Municipal Corporation’s own records show that elections have been held just five times since Independence: 1956, 1972, 1980, 2005, and 2018. The government dissolved the elected council in 1960, 1975, and 1983. In J&K, the denial of urban self-governance was not an accident. It was the default, reinforced by political centralisation and, in Srinagar, by the security logic of the insurgency years, which suspended ordinary civic life for a generation.
The 74th Constitutional Amendment of 1992 mandated the devolution of powers to urban local bodies. Before August 2019, its mandatory provisions did not apply to J&K under Article 370. Since reorganisation as a Union Territory, real steps have been taken: roads, schools, and health sub-centres have been transferred to the two Municipal Corporations; a high-level devolution committee was constituted in February 2025. But the NITI Aayog report calls for something more demanding: structural change in who governs the city and who answers for the consequences.
Nowhere is the cost of that unanswered question more evident than at Dal Lake. A CAG report from April 2026 found that its open water area fell from 15.40 to 12.91 square kilometres between 2007 and 2020, a contraction of over ten per cent in thirteen years, despite Rs 45 crore invested in sewage treatment plants. The plants were built; the sewer networks connecting households and houseboats to them were not. The Lakes Conservation and Management Authority regulates land use but cannot coordinate with the Municipal Corporation on solid waste. Multiple agencies partially implement orders from the National Green Tribunal. The result: a lake studied, audited, litigated, and funded for four decades, still shrinking. No one is in charge.
Jammu presents the same picture across different geographies. The Jammu Development Authority prepares the Master Plan; the Municipal Corporation is responsible for enforcing it; the Irrigation and Flood Control Department manages the river; and Jammu Smart City Limited executes flagship projects. When the Tawi flooded in August 2025, encroachments on nallah protection walls were found to have reduced drainage capacity. That these structures existed at all, in plain violation of the Master Plan’s no-construction buffer, is not a story of individual lawbreaking. It is a story of a city with no government capable of consistently applying its own rules.
The Smart City Mission delivered tangible infrastructure in both cities through Special Purpose Vehicles outside the municipal corporations. But the SPVs reported to their boards, not to elected ward councillors. When the mission reached financial closure in March 2025 and the SPVs wound down, the maintenance question reverted to the same under-resourced corporations that had been bypassed to build the infrastructure in the first place. The government chose to invest in the city while continuing to withhold the means of governing it.
The NITI Aayog report’s prescriptions directly address this dysfunction. Directly elected mayors with fixed tenures and genuine executive authority would create a political centre of gravity that J&K’s cities have never had. Today, the mayor of the Jammu Municipal Corporation is elected solely by ward councillors, making the office inherently weak. Integrating development authorities under city government oversight would end the impunity of agencies that plan cities they do not have to manage. Formula-based finance commission transfers would give municipal bodies something long denied: the ability to plan beyond a single financial year.
As a Union Territory under direct central administration, J&K does not face the political friction that prevents most states from acting on the 74th Amendment’s promise. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has a direct administrative relationship with J&K that no state government has. This is a rare opening that should not be wasted. Under the 2035 Master Plan, Srinagar’s metropolitan planning area now extends to 766 square kilometres, yet no metropolitan planning committee is operational. Jammu hosts one of India’s largest pilgrimage economies, yet its municipal corporation cannot reliably plan its own drainage. The February 2025 devolution committee must produce a time-bound, public action plan. Direct election of mayors with executive powers must be on the legislative agenda before the next municipal cycle.
Sir Walter Lawrence’s warning about the Jhelum went unheeded for a century. The NITI Aayog report makes a structurally identical argument: J&K’s governance problem, if left unaddressed, will continue to manifest as floods, shrinking lakes, encroached nallahs, and infrastructure no one maintains. J&K has been told this before. The question is whether those who govern these cities can finally answer for them.
(The author is a Senior Research Officer at the Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi)
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