20/06/2025
The elected J & K Government and JJM.
An idiot’s guide to failure .
JJM is a centrally sponsored scheme rolled out a few years back, with the aim of augumenting water supply infrastructure across India.
We are water deficit and money deficit and it is one of those rare moments when money is available to invest in water supply infrastructure.
Predictably a scheme dealing with a resource as scarce as water, and doling out an even scarcer resource viz. money—- ensures a race amongst states to get as much of the scarce money allocated to invest in harnessing a scarce resource, water.
This entails a collective thrust. It involves making a macro plan, auditing water sources, identifying gaps, having a strategy and a set of identifiable technical objectives cast against a realistic timeline. And above all a monitoring mechanism to monitor successes and failures of executed projects. Getting money from the centre and utilising it to harness water resources is in itself a scientific exercise. And the reality as it stares in our faces is that if we don’t get the money somebody else will. Money is a scarce resource and states scramble through the crowd of states, jostling their way through to get a share in the money pie.
We in J & K always reach the money pile after there is no money left, exactly in the same way as police arrives in Bollywood movies, after all possible crimes are committed and the villains have fled.
In response to the scientific and managerial challenges that we encounter, in accessing and getting money allocated, in J & K we will be at the mercy of “A once upon a time”, type babu, living in a time bubble, sitting in a dimly lit dirty office, scratching his head, yawning, stretching his arms, inventing ways and means to not work and believing that money will never come.
We are historically unprepared, unmanaged, and devoid of any planning or any strategy. Our problem is that we are failure specialists and an antidote to successs.
This time will be no different. There is an added whammy. We have an elected government, which seems to be keen that we break our own previous records of laggardness, and failures.
The concerned department in ourJ & K supposed to take on this challenge is the PHE, also now called Jal Shakti.
This department is understaffed at all levels. Between irrigation and water supply departments 25 head of divisions called Executive Engineers are vacant. In my district, vacancy in technical staff at different levels is about 50%. It is the skilled Human Resources which will make project reports, get them approved, tender them out and oversee their ex*****on. With no will to fill up these posts and seemingly obsessed with some other motives to fill these posts, who will run the department. Departments have to be run by people. They wont run on an auto mode.
As if this was not enough, in the recently concluded assembly session, a house committee was formed to investigate works executed under JJM scheme. The government of the day believes that malpractices have been committed.
I have my disagreements and I believe this is a death knell for the all important JJM scheme. One doesn’t need to be a genius, but certainly needs to be an idiot to understand that schemes under investigation means Babus will not work. They get scared. They simply stop working. And that has already happened. JJM had come to a grinding halt. What a shame?
And the current conscience keeper government should have known that all the past water supply schemes if ever probed and audited would fill up the jails to capacity. And most of these jail filling schemes have been executed during the previous tenures of our squeaky clean present government.
Mark my words. As on date there is money out there. You have to go and grab it. But we are busy with theatre. By the time our theatre flops, money in JJM will have dried up.
