Unproductive ED

Estates Department is required to provide accommodation to Government employees. It means it has to have enormous funds to be spent on creating adequate accommodation, maintain existing accommodation and make renovations in structures that need to be attended. At present the Department has a total of 3167 quarters in Jammu and 1248 quarters in Srinagar which are grossly inadequate to meet the requirement of the employees, who are entitled for the Government accommodation as per the laid down norms. The question is how the Government can bridge the gap between what it has and what its requirements are. Since the number of Government employees is regularly increasing year after year owing to the fact that new formulations are coming into existence and manpower shortage of many departments and institutions is being steadily reduced, the ED has to build new quarters.
With the eruption of insurgency in 1990, more pressure came on ED because apart from Government employees large security force contingents also had to be accommodated. In view of paucity of accommodation, the Estates Department decided to hire private hotel rooms and houses in both capital cities of Srinagar and Jammu. Last year the Estates Department had hired more than 600 rooms in the hotels and over 200 private houses for the employees of civil administration and around 135 houses for the officers/officials of the police administration in Jammu following opening of Durbar here. This speaks volume about the shortage of accommodation for the department. We do not have the figures about the amount of rent which the Government paid to private rented accommodation but we can envisage that it is huge amount which the state exchequer has to fish out annually. The question is why the ED does not take steps on war basis to provide its own accommodation to the employees and thereby save crores of rupees which otherwise has to be paid by way of rent for the rooms rented to accommodate Government employees.
It is learnt that in 2009 the Government had planned to construct Government quarters in Jawahar Nagar colony in Srinagar and Gandhi Nagar colony in Jammu. If the existing structures could be raised to four or five storey buildings it would have provided accommodation to a large number of employees. However, for reasons unknown the proposal never materialized and the problem remained unresolved. With that the ED failed to create additional infrastructure all these years thereby allowing the problem of accommodation become more critical. There was also a proposal of raising multi-storey structure at Sidhra in Jammu and for which even land had been identified. But why that project was also shelved is not clear.
The essential issue in this connection is of creating productive assets. The Estates Department has to bear in mind that its assets should multiply and ultimately become self sufficient for expansion and service. ED has to do some hard homework and find out how it can increase its assets and not remain complacent with what is in hand. In order to translate the idea of creation of productive estates into practice, late Chief Minister Mufti Speed had ordered constituting a committee headed by the Principal Secretary Planning with secretaries of a few other concerned departments to submit their report on how the ED could make its estates productive by September 15, 2015. This committee has not drafted any report till date. The result is that the very idea of productive estates was scuttled.
The simple question is this. Year after year there is increasing demand for Government quarters as the existing quantum is inadequate to meet the requirements. What then is the Government going to do? Will it continue to pay huge rent for private accommodation or will it explore means of increasing its assets. The Government has to find an answer to this question and if it finds that increasing its assets is the better option then it must take steps in that direction.

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