Chief Minister Omar Abdullah opened the upgraded Residency Road–High Street in Jammu on 7 August. The corridor runs 1.2 km, from Raghunathji Mandir to CM House, with adjoining stretches included. Jammu Smart City Limited executed the work at a cost of ₹9.18 crore. The road now carries underground utility ducts. Communication cables have been shifted below ground. Footpaths have been laid in paver blocks. The carriageway is bituminous concrete. Drains are RCC. The aim is simple enough. Pedestrians should walk with ease. Traffic should move without knots. One of the city’s busiest commercial axes should look cleaner and better ordered.
The wider record reads well on paper. By March 2026, Jammu had completed 125 of 127 sanctioned projects, worth ₹2,940 crore against an outlay of ₹2,969 crore. Srinagar had completed 157 of 161, valued at ₹3,532 crore of ₹3,634 crore. Taken together, the two cities have finished 98 per cent of 288 projects costing over ₹6,600 crore. Integrated Command and Control Centres are operational. Heritage trails have been restored. Food streets have come up. Riverfronts have been redeveloped. New assets have been added, among them the Tawi Wonderland, built on the waste-to-wonder idea. Few states can show such numbers.
Yet numbers are not the same as experience. In Srinagar, light rain still leaves water standing on the roads. Drainage lines have failed in several stretches. Residents have complained of poor material. Questions have been raised about how contracts were run. The government has responded by ordering a third-party external audit. That is the right step. The Anti-Corruption Bureau has already examined the use of inferior construction material. Meanwhile, traders and commuters live with old problems. Bottlenecks remain. Parking is short. Work sites have stayed open longer than promised. The spending has been heavy. The relief has been partial.
Maintenance is the weaker half of the story. Street lights fail and stay dark. Promenades wear out sooner than they should. Agencies work along parallel lines rather than together. A road dug up months after it was laid is a familiar sight. Jammu’s record on completion is better, but it is not free of these faults. Lighting failures recur here too. And the national mission is now closing. The assets will remain long after the scheme’s name fades from files.
That is where attention must shift. Audits should be published, not filed. Quality checks should be firm and independent. Drainage must be tested against real rain, not design assumptions. Every completed asset needs a named custodian, a maintenance budget and a repair timeline. Without these, concrete and paver blocks become decoration.
Residency Road’s makeover is welcome. It will help those who walk and drive there daily. But the real test comes later. It comes in the monsoon. It comes in the second and third year, in the small repairs no one inaugurates. Cities are judged by how they work, not by how they open.
