Anika Nazir
There was a time when governance in Jammu and Kashmir was about delivery. Every file was online, every payment traceable, every department accountable. That phase was accused of being bureaucratic, too system-driven, detached from ground reality. Today, the ground awaits execution, a governance vacuum that seems to grow larger with each passing day.
Official data as of October 2025 reveal the scale of paralysis. Departments that touch people’s lives – Information, Mining, Industry & Commerce, Revenue, Youth Services, Culture and Transport – have recorded virtually no expenditure. Water, power, irrigation and forest departments have managed barely one per cent of their annual budgets. Roads, Housing, Rural Development and Tourism – which should by now have used half their allocations – have actually utilised just about ten per cent. This is not inertia. It is abandonment.
The administration seems to have mastered the art of blaming the LG government for its own inaction. The numbers are revealing, the facts undeniable, yet the spin continues. The language of “monitoring” and “review” has replaced the language of results. Governance is being performed through press notes, not projects. The politics is full time; administration, part time-attempt to convert implementation deficit into political and psychological dividend.
The re-institution of the Darbar Move is the clearest symbol of this drift. In a fully digitised government, when every file moves electronically, reviving a colonial ritual that shuts one Secretariat for six months is regression by choice. It adds no value to the citizen, no efficiency to administration – only optics. The message is unmistakable: symbolism matters more than service. Emotion matters more than citizen empowerment.
Transparency was once the hallmark of this system. Digitisation, e-office, BEAMS, and online approvals had made delays visible and accountability unavoidable. That system is now paralysed. Funds are not released, works not uploaded, tenders not awarded. The machinery exists but refuses to move. What was once criticised as bureaucratic rigidity has now turned into bureaucratic paralysis.
The scale of non-performance defies the explanation of coincidence. When nearly every development department shows the same pattern – low releases, lower expenditure, unfinished works – it cannot be accidental. It is deliberate under-execution, governance slowed down by design. Politics has taken precedence over public purpose.
The story of today’s J&K is not of absence of funds, but of absence of will. A government that inherited transparency has replaced it with theatre. The result is visible in the numbers: capital expenditure at historic lows, departments dormant, works unexecuted, and citizens left waiting.
This is governance turned inward – a government busy managing its own politics, not people’s needs. Performance has been replaced by performance of a different kind – the political one. And that, sadly, is the ground reality.
(The author is a political commentator and social activist.
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