Srinagar Smart City Limited got its audit only after this week’s rains exposed the Civil Secretariat’s flooded ground floor. What it hasn’t got, in nearly two years, is a single hard question from an Assembly where every one of the city’s MLAs sits with the ruling alliance.
I. Ahmad wani
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah called Monday’s flooding of the Civil Secretariat’s ground floor “a matter of shame.” Hours of rain had already submerged roads across the city, stranded commuters for hours, and left the India Meteorological Department warning of more heavy rain, flash floods and landslides through July 23. Mr Abdullah should extend that shame to his own government’s oversight of Srinagar Smart City Limited, not only to the administration he blames it on.
SSCL is a state government company under the Companies Act. Srinagar Municipal Commissioner Fazlul Haseeb currently holds the CEO’s charge. Its Board is chaired by whoever holds Commissioner Secretary of the Housing and Urban Development Department, currently Mandeep Kaur, and above that sits a State-Level High Powered Steering Committee headed by the Chief Secretary. This is not an agency operating beyond reach. It sits inside the Housing and Urban Development Department, which Mr Abdullah himself holds as Minister-in-charge. When he says he cannot account for Smart City spending beyond the Jhelum riverfront, he is describing a gap in his own department’s oversight, not only a legacy left behind by others.
That gap did not appear this week. It has been visible in the government’s own statements for a year and a half, if anyone in office had cared to look. In February 2025, SSCL officials told reporters 143 of 161 projects were complete and the rest would finish by March. An RTI reply that July put the figure at 131 of 141, with “NIL” unutilised funds. By September, a separate count put it at 144 of 164 projects, worth Rs 3,311.79 crore of a sanctioned Rs 3,634.32 crore. Then, this March, replying to an unstarred question in the Assembly, the government told the House that Smart City Mission projects stood fully implemented across Jammu and Kashmir. Four different figures in thirteen months, each one more reassuring than the last, and not one triggered a serious question from the elected members meant to ask them. It took a flooded Secretariat to produce the audit that four separate progress reports did not.
Blame here has at least three addresses, and the elected government occupies only one of them, though a real one. Most of the 164 projects, the redevelopment of Lal Chowk, upgrades to MA Road and Residency Road, the Integrated Traffic Management System, Riverfront Phase 1, were designed and executed between 2017 and 2024, under central and Lieutenant Governor administration before J&K had an elected government of its own. That is precisely the period the ruling National Conference points to when it accuses the BJP of funnelling funds to preferred contractors, and an Anti-Corruption Bureau chargesheet already names individuals from that era over the use of substandard material. The Centre, which pushed this model of riverfront beautification onto a hundred Indian cities without matching investment in drainage audits, carries its share too. SSCL itself has a fair defence on one narrow point: officials say Khanyar and Sadar Kadal, among the worst-hit areas this week, were never part of the project’s scope, and that the drainage networks there pre-date Smart City work entirely. That distinction is real and deserves to be said plainly, even in a piece critical of the government. But fairness on one detail does not excuse the larger pattern, an elected government that has now run this department for close to two years without once ordering the kind of audit that Monday’s flood produced within days.
The deeper question this flooding exposed deserves more attention than it has received. Every one of Srinagar’s eight elected MLAs sits with the ruling alliance: seven with the National Conference, one, in Central Shalteng, with its coalition partner Congress. Not one sits in opposition. An assembly system depends on elected representatives watching the executive on behalf of their constituents, asking the uncomfortable questions a minister would rather not answer. Srinagar’s voters returned a full slate of members whose own party runs the department under scrutiny, and in nearly two years, not one of them asked in the Assembly why four progress reports could not explain why the Civil Secretariat’s ground floor still floods.
“A one-party mandate is a legitimate outcome of an election. A one-party silence on oversight for two years is not what that vote was supposed to produce.”
Jammu offers a contrast, though not a flattering one for either side. Its city seats, Jammu East, Jammu West and Bahu among them, belong to the BJP, in opposition to the state government. That structural opposition has not produced sharper accountability either. When Jammu flooded last year, it was the National Conference’s own Jammu provincial president, not an opposition MLA, who dismissed the Jammu Smart City project as a “grand illusion,” reaching for the same deflection used in Srinagar: blame the administration that came before, not the department running it now. Months later, replying to an Assembly question, the Chief Minister told the House that Jammu’s Smart City project, having spent over Rs 815 crore since 2019, had received no major complaints. Both claims, disaster and reassurance, came from within the same ruling alliance within the space of months, and no opposition MLA in Jammu tested either one at the time it was made.
What connects the two cities is not party colour. A one-party mandate in Srinagar and an opposition mandate in Jammu produced the identical result: no sustained legislative scrutiny of either Smart City project until floodwater forced the government’s hand in public, in both cases. Part of this is structural to Jammu and Kashmir’s current status. The Anti-Corruption Bureau, which alone has produced a chargesheet in this entire saga, functions under the Lieutenant Governor’s reserved powers, not the elected Cabinet. The department running the project, and the decision to audit it, sits with the elected government. Responsibility for wrongdoing and responsibility for administration currently answer to two different authorities in the same Union Territory, and neither seems to have asked the other a hard question until this week.
An audit ordered after the water recedes is accountability by embarrassment, not by design. A standing legislative committee that reviews Smart City spending every quarter, regardless of which party’s MLAs sit on it, would do more for Srinagar’s drains than another beautified stretch of riverfront. Until the Assembly asks the question before the flood, not after it, Srinagar and Jammu will keep getting the same answer: an audit, a promise, and the next monsoon.
