Every monsoon season, Srinagar performs the same dispiriting ritual. Rain falls, streets flood, residents wade, officials blame, and the city waits for the waters to recede along with any promise of accountability. This week’s brief but brutal downpour — which turned Khanyar, Karan Nagar and downtown into waterlogged chaos within the hour — was not a cloudburst. It was ordinary rain. That is precisely what makes it extraordinary in its indictment.
Srinagar was selected under the Smart Cities Mission with considerable fanfare. Over Rs 3,600 crore was allocated, consultants hired, detailed project reports filed, and 160-odd schemes declared near-complete. On paper, the city should now be resilient to moderate rainfall. On the ground, it buckled within sixty minutes. The distance between official completion certificates and functional infrastructure has become the defining measure of urban governance failure in the Valley.
The rot is not hard to diagnose. Capital expenditure was treated as an end in itself. Drainage networks were laid or relaid, photographs taken, and files closed. What followed — regular desilting, removal of encroachments, seasonal maintenance, operational discipline — received neither the funding nor the attention that sustains infrastructure between inauguration and irrelevance. A smart city is not a construction project. It is a living system. Treat it otherwise and it dies quietly, then announces its death loudly every time the clouds open.
The political dimension compounds the embarrassment. The JKNC, now leading the elected government since late 2024, spent years in opposition excoriating the Lieutenant Governor’s administration for reducing Srinagar to a municipal afterthought. That criticism was forceful and, in significant part, justified. But opposition rhetoric and governing responsibility are different arts. The party now holds the levers — of planning, of funding, of execution and of maintenance. The alibi of legacy failure has a natural expiry. It has expired.
What Srinagar requires now is not another master plan or another round of consultant fees. It requires an immediate, transparent audit of every drainage component funded under Smart City and allied schemes — what was built, whether it works, and who certified its completion. It requires a time-bound pre-season drive to clear blocked drains and reclaim encroached nallahs. And it requires a shift in administrative culture: from infrastructure as spectacle to infrastructure as service.
Traders losing business, commuters stranded, stagnant water breeding disease, and tourists reconsidering the summer capital — these are not abstractions. They are the compounding costs of institutional lethargy. Srinagar has been promised transformation too many times to mistake promises for delivery. The next shower is already forming on the horizon. The question for those in power is painfully simple: will the city flood again, or will someone finally be held to account?
