The Civic Cholera of Jammu

Col M M Shah, SM (Retd)

maqboolshahin@gmail.com

In Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, Dr. Juvenal Urbino returns from Paris to his filthy Caribbean city and wages a one-man crusade: he builds sewers, enforces market hygiene, and declares open war on stagnant water. Márquez's genius lies in the pun of his title - the symptoms of cholera and the sickness of a neglected society are the same fever. Walk through Jammu's colonies today, and the metaphor needs no literary training to recognise. Our plague is not bacterial; it is administrative.

Darkness and disease. Consider Sainik Colony, ironically home to those who once upheld the highest standards of order for the nation. Security lights installed at public expense stand dark across large stretches, and many lanes were never covered by the network at all. This is not merely an inconvenience - it is a grave and continuing security risk. The Sainik Colony-Channi Himmat belt has seen a steady run of thefts and burglaries: a wiring theft from an under-construction house in Sainik Colony in March this year, a burglary of valuables worth roughly Rs 10 lakh in Bhalla Enclave last winter, and earlier an organised gang was caught stripping batteries from Smart City surveillance equipment at Bikram Chowk, Amphalla, and Parade crossings. Citizens, helpless before this darkness, now keep their outside lights burning through the night - paying avoidable power bills for a semblance of security that is the Municipality's legal duty to provide. Colonies, meanwhile, remain uncovered by CCTV cameras at strategic entry and exit points; the 610-odd cameras monitored by city police concentrate on main arteries, leaving residential interiors to luck and private doorbells.

The official sanitation narrative, one must acknowledge, is not all bleak. Jammu leapt from 248th place in Swachh Survekshan 2023 to 42nd in 2025, and vector-control drives brought dengue cases down from 2,932 to 1,097 in a single year - a 62 percent decline. Yet even the JMC admits barely 26 percent of households segregate waste, and open drains choked with plastic run sluggishly alongside homes in colony after colony, exuding a stench no resident chose but every resident inhales. Stagnant water in open drains remains the breeding ground for Jammu's dengue burden. Rankings measure what surveyors see on inspection days; residents measure what they step over every morning. Roadsides, dry canals, and vacant plots across the city have quietly become open-air repositories of garbage - and of disease.

The Prime Minister's Swachh Bharat campaign receives scant attention precisely where it matters: at the gutter outside one's own gate. This is why the sanitation user charge - currently voluntary in practice, and reportedly Rs 100 officially - should be made compulsory for every household, linked to property records like electricity dues. A scheme sustained by the conscientious few while the indifferent many free-ride will never succeed.

The quiet land grab. The deeper rot lies in encroachment. A particularly visible menace, so far untouched by any enforcement drive, is the private ramp: homeowners whose houses sit above the normal ground level build concrete ramps over public road space to drive their cars in and out. Each such ramp is illegal occupation of the public carriageway; it eats into already narrow by-lanes, makes passing vehicles coming from the opposite direction a daily ordeal, and leaves no room for emergency vehicles. These ramps are encroachments in concrete and should be dismantled, with the cost recovered from the encroachers. Nor is this the only form of theft: narrow lanes and marginal common strips have been swallowed by extended walls and unauthorised parking while municipal officials avert their eyes. The scale is no longer anecdotal - the government informed the legislature that 688 kanals in Bahu tehsil and 579 kanals in Jammu South tehsil are under illegal occupation, and the Anti-Corruption Bureau has charge-sheeted a Tehsildar and Patwari for allegedly transferring prime land worth Rs 22 crore.

It is the ordinary, honest landowner who pays for this collapsing revenue administration - running from pillar to post for a simple demarcation while files gather dust, dates are adjourned, and quiet suggestions are made that the process might "move" for a consideration.

Toward a prescription. Dr. Urbino understood what our administration has forgotten: public health and public order are not events but disciplines. A fogging drive every autumn is medicine after infection; the vaccine is systemic. In that spirit:

1. Audit and repair every non-functional streetlight within sixty days, extend coverage to unlit lanes in Sainik Colony, Channi Himmat and elsewhere, and fix accountability for maintenance contracts.

2. Extend CCTV coverage to colony entry-exit points and vulnerable pockets, integrated with police control rooms.

3. Make the Swachh Bharat user charge mandatory for every household, with an authenticated receipt to end the Rs 100 versus Rs 200 discrepancy.

4. Undertake a sincere timebound drive to unclog and repair damaged drains throughout. This should be treated as priority number one towards ensure a cleaner disease free Jammu.

5. Launch a time-bound drive to demolish ramps and structures on public road space, recovering demolition costs from violators.

6. Mandate patwari demarcations within thirty days of application, with penalties for delay and digitised, time-stamped records.

7. Impose spot fines for dumping waste in dry canals, vacant plots, and drains, with geo-tagged photographic evidence; Jammu Smart City's AI-based civic monitoring tender shows the technology already exists.

8. Constitute ward-level citizens' sanitation and security committees to verify - not merely be informed of - municipal performance.

García Márquez ended his novel with two aging lovers sailing a river endlessly, refusing to return to a corrupt shore. Jammu's residents deserve a happier ending. But endings, like sanitation and security, are not granted. They are built - daily, ward by ward, lane by lane, and drain by drain.