Atal top-up to a Nehru scheme
A two-year lifeline for JNNURM should be a wake up call for states like Tamil Nadu
By : m.r. venkatesh
Update: 2015-05-06 05:49 GMT
Chennai: In the euphoria over the latest Union Cabinet's approvals to two new urban missions involving massive outlay of about Rs1 lakh crore over the next five years with the ‘Smart Cities Mission’ taking centrestage, a more pivotal decision virtually got squeezed on the margins. While the Narendra Modi-led NDA regime has renamed the erstwhile UPA government's flagship scheme, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), as the ‘Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT)’ after former Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee, it has, nonetheless, found it prudent not to abandon ‘JNNURM’ altogether.
In what metaphorically seems an ‘Atal top-up to a Nehru scheme’, the Modi Cabinet has also approved central funding under ‘AMRUT’ to projects not completed under ‘JUNNURM’ since the earlier Manmohan Singh government had launched it in December 2005 across 65 ‘mission cities’ and several hundred non-mission smaller cities and towns across the country. “The ‘JUNNURM’ projects relating to urban development sanctioned during 2005-2012 and achieved physical progress of 50 per cent, availing 50 per cent of central assistance released, and those sanctioned during 2012-14 (when UPA-II demitted office), will be supported till March 2017,” says the official release on the Cabinet decisions.
This near two-year lifeline given for completing unfinished ‘JNNURM’ projects is a clear signal ensuring continuity that already highly urbanised states like Tamil Nadu should leverage and complete them with no further cost and time overruns. The Centre, in fact, has now given more flexibility to states in designing schemes under ‘AMRUT’ and sees it as “a foundation to enable cities and towns, to eventually grow into Smart Cities”.
Thus, balance funding to complete ‘JNNURM’ projects has been ensured, notwithstanding the name changes in line with BJP's political preferences. The move is a tacit acknowledgement that ‘JNNURM’ — with its various sub-missions like 'Basic Services for Urban Poor (BSUP), ‘Integrated Housing and Slum Development Programme (IHSDP)’ and ‘Urban Infrastructure and Governance Scheme (UIG)’, — has indeed been the first major effort by the Centre post-Independence to tackle the myriad problems of urbanisation and development as the Indian economy moves to a higher growth trajectory.
Why is ‘JNNURM’ so important and why did it fall below the expectations? In fact, a detailed 271-page final report by consulting firm ‘Grant Thornton’, appointed by the Centre “as the appraisal agency for JNNURM” and submitted in March 2011, has come out with detailed, far-reaching views on the entire gamut of issues of urban development and on the ‘course correction’ to be made in implementing this huge, multi-faceted project.
The appraisal was done on the basis of pre-approved samples of 66 cities (41 mission cities and 25 non-mission cities) covered under ‘JNNURM’. Terming ‘JNNURM’ having been “instrumental in rejuvenating the urban space in the country”, the report lauds it as the “first national flagship programme of this nature and size in the urban sector.” This is notwithstanding the fact successive governments at the Centre since 1950s’ have initiated urban development programmes (for details see info box).
The ‘JNNURM’, according to the appraisal report, had made a huge difference from the earlier ones as it came with “mandatory reforms (including at the states and urban local bodies (ULB levels) that are expected to ensure sustainability of efforts, improved efficiency, transparency and accountability in implementing and managing projects, and in participation and ownership of the citizens, especially the slum communities.”
Projects stuck: While urban development is primarily a state subject, never was there such a lavish indulgence by the Centre as under ‘JNNURM’, it points out. But the report found that “projects got stuck up in most cases due to non-achievement of reforms, either at the ULB or at the state-level.” The ULBs have 'limited capacities’, even as funds getting directly transferred to the executing agencies such as ‘line departments’ has disadvantaged the ULBs’ which are finally accountable for proper execution of projects, it pointed out.
Nation-wide, the report found that under the UIG component of ‘JNNURM’ alone, out of 367 approved projects with a total cost of Rs 46,515 crore, only 62 have been completed, involving a total expenditure of Rs17,078 crore for the years scrutinised since the mission's launch.In state capital Chennai for instance, under the UIG component, only five of the 39 approved projects had been completed since ‘JNNURM’ launch. In Puducherry, even two of the sanctioned projects could not be finished. Their record under the BSUP component has been no better.
Five projects were sanctioned for Chennai, but none completed, says the appraisal report. Similarly, none of the four approved for Puducherry made any headway.Another major lacunae found by the appraisers of ‘JNNURM’ was that the criteria of funding the ‘Mission Cities’ was done on the basis of the 2001 population census, which put smaller states at a disadvantage.“It may be desirable to have a set of criteria apart from population,” like existing level of infrastructure and financial health of ULBs’, the report recommends.
Interestingly, the report says that while a maximum number of projects were sanctioned for Kolkata, followed by Chennai, Bengaluru, Delhi and Ahmedabad, the maximum number of projects completed was only in Ahmedabad where local NGOs played a key pro-active role.The Grant Thornton report also found that in implementing urban infrastructure and governance projects, five cities in the following order have emerged as the “progressive cities” under ‘JNNURM’. They are Nanded, Vadodara, Vishakapatam, Indore and Raipur. Now that unfinished projects under ‘JNNURM’ have got a fresh leash of life, will states like Tamil Nadu wake up?