SHAMEFUL WASTE

A STRING OF EIGHT HIGH-PROFILE PROJECTS UNDER SUCCESSIVE CONGRESS AND BJP REGIMES HAS TURNED INTO CAUTIONARY TALES OF FISCAL SPLURGE AND POOR PLANNING IN JAIPUR AND REST OF THE DESERT STATE

- By Rohit Parihar

WHEN THE SUPREME COURT, IN MARCH THIS YEAR, ordered the demolition of kitschy replicas of the ‘Seven Wonders’ built along the banks of Ajmer’s 12th-century Ana Sagar Lake—a protected wetland—it wasn't judicial activism so much as a belated course correction for a folly committed two years ago. Around the same time, Rajasthan chief minister Bhajan Lal Sharma ordered the dismantling of Jaipur's 16-km-long Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS), a corridor completed 15 years ago but never brought into use. Blamed for traffic chaos and fatal accidents, the BRTS had become emblematic of the state's flawed urban planning.

Elsewhere, there are efforts to salvage ailing projects. A sum of Rs 12,000 crore has been proposed for the overhaul of Jaipur’s partially functional and financially bleeding metro rail, originally launched in 2011. Another Rs 50 crore has been allocated for a fresh feasibility study and works for the Dravyavati River rejuvenation project, where an earlier Rs 1,500 crore intervention has only turned the river into a fetid drain. Even a sprawling new Education Hub in Jaipur, built just two years ago but largely unoccupied, is now being reimagined to house branches of national institutions.

When Sharma took office in December 2023, he inherited an administrative quagmire. The legacy includes a long list of grandiose “flagship” projects announced by the CM's predecessors—his BJP senior Vasundhara Raje and the Congress's Ashok Gehlot, who alternately helmed the previous five state governments. Marketed as transformative, these initiatives were often timed to electoral cycles and plagued by shifting priorities, bureaucratic inertia and inadequate follow-through. Some of these projects remain unused; others were abandoned midway or are reeling under cost overruns. What unites them is a trail of squandered public funds and shattered public trust.