One would have thought that the Jawahar Lal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), with a corpus of over Rs 1,20,536 crore spread over the next seven years and an annual fund of Rs 17,219 crore would attract all major cities of the country with innovative projects and required urban reforms. That is clearly not the case with the capital, New Delhi.
According to the latest report on the status of urban and state-level reforms required of various urban centres as the main criterion for funding for various projects, Delhi has been lagging far behind the other three metropolitan cities, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai.
The urban and state-level reforms required include rationalisation of stamp duty, coverage and efficiency in collecting property tax, e-governance, and shift to accrual based double accounting system.
While the other three cities, especially Kolkata, have been singled out for praise as almost all the 23 reforms at urban body and state level and even optional reforms have been achieved, Delhi appears to be advancing time lines to beyond 2010-11.
Over and above this, the Delhi government had submitted 47 detailed project reports on various things that it wanted to get done, out of which 44 have been returned to various agencies for modifications after they had been appraised by various technical agencies.
Only three DPRs therefore are under active consideration by the urban development ministry including a grand project for the restoration of Connaught Place, also known as Rajiv Chowk.
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“Despite our best efforts the Delhi government has not yet come on board, conforming to committing timelines for reforms and guidelines for the preparation of project documents,” said a senior official in the ministry.
Delhi, slated to get a makeover worth over Rs 65,000 crore as the host city for the 2010 commonwealth games is perhaps not too bothered by the fact that it is allowing the chance to access the JNNURM funds to drift away.
In the last three years it has been consistently inefficient in leveraging the JNNURM funds, while fund-starved Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai have beaten it to them.