The Ministry for Urban Development in its recent report claimed that there is no proper coordination between the Jammu Municipal Corporation (JMC), Jammu Development Authority (JDA), District Development Board (DDB) and Town Planning Organisation in preparation of plans and implementation of the same in Jammu city. Further, the report said there is no clarity on the urban planning function, implementation of Jammu Master Plan-2021 and framing the various building bylaws. “The master plans lack the essence of the Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP) for the city. This is leading to planning becoming an independent function and affecting the overall growth of the city. The JMC should be assigned the function of planning, including town planning for the urban area, as it merely performs the role of a building permission agency,” the report said. “The data about urban agglomeration in Jammu is not available. The JDA has not been meticulous in even gathering current demographic data about the city, leave alone data on urban services,” it added. As per the Central ministry report, urban planning in Jammu was an afterthought, which came into reality with the establishment of the JDA in 1970. The JDA prepared the first master plan for Jammu for a 20-year perspective. The master plan envisaged strict zoning norms. “However, not having absolute control over the land, a large chunk of the land transferred to the JDA got encroached. In the absence of a land pool, actual development could not take place as conceived in the master plan,” the report claimed. Further, during subsequent decades, Jammu faced an unprecedented growth in population due to migration from the Valley and rapid growth of commercial and industrial activities, which resulted in a mismatch between the demand for serviced land and availability of the same. With this gap, a large-scale development emerged on private land without following any planning norms. Following the experience of implementing the previous development plan, the JDA prepared another master plan in 1994 for Jammu envisioning Jammu 2021. The Jammu Master Plan-2021 is an effort to achieve an appropriate balance between the spatial allocation for various activities, adequate arrangements, and reservations to accommodate different kinds of physical infrastructure and public utility systems.