Current Status of JNNURM: Successes and Lessons Learned

When India launched the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission in December 2005, it was the most ambitious attempt the country had ever made to fix its cities. Roads, water supply, sewerage, housing for the poor, and the way municipalities themselves were governed were all meant to change together. Nearly a decade later, when the Mission formally closed in 2014, it left behind a complicated balance sheet of new infrastructure, partial reforms, and unfinished projects. Understanding where JNNURM ended up tells us a great deal about what it takes to renew a fast-growing urban nation.

Overview of the mission’s coverage 🔗

JNNURM was launched on 3 December 2005 and ran until 2014, when it was succeeded by the AMRUT programme. It envisaged a total investment of over twenty billion dollars across seven years, making it the largest urban scheme attempted in the country up to that point. The Mission was managed jointly by the Ministry of Urban Development and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, each responsible for a different part of the urban problem.

The programme worked through two main sub-missions. The first, Urban Infrastructure and Governance (UIG), dealt with water supply, sewerage, solid waste management, roads, and urban transport in large cities. The second, Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP), focused on housing and civic amenities for people living in slums and squatter settlements. Two parallel schemes, UIDSSMT and IHSDP, extended similar support to smaller towns.

How the 65 cities were chosen 🔗

The Mission identified 65 cities, often called the “mission cities,” which were eligible for assistance. These were selected on the basis of urban population from the 2001 Census and grouped into three categories: mega cities, cities with populations above one million, and selected smaller cities of religious, historic, or tourist importance.

Before a city could draw funds, it had to do two things. First, it had to prepare a City Development Plan (CDP), a strategic document setting a 20-25 year vision for the city and identifying priority projects. Second, the state government and the urban local body had to sign a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with the central government, committing to a timetable of governance reforms in exchange for central money. This “reform-linked” design was the heart of JNNURM.

The scale of projects approved 🔗

By March 2014, the UIG component alone had sanctioned 538 projects worth about ₹60,730 crore across the 65 mission cities. These covered the full range of urban systems, from sewage treatment plants and water networks to storm-water drains and bus rapid transit corridors. All 65 cities had also prepared their City Development Plans by 2012, giving Indian municipalities, many for the first time, a structured planning document to work with.

Major achievements of the mission 🔗

JNNURM’s biggest contribution was not any single project but a shift in national attention. The Planning Commission, in its mid-term appraisal of the Eleventh Plan, found that the Mission had been effective in renewing focus on the urban sector across the country and had succeeded in channelling significant investment into the physical infrastructure of cities. Much of that money went into basic services that directly affect everyday life, such as piped water and sanitation.

New infrastructure on the ground 🔗

The visible results were substantial. Cities gained new water treatment capacity, sewerage networks, and solid waste systems. Public transport received a major boost: under the bus funding scheme, a total of 15,260 buses were approved for 61 cities at a cost of about ₹4,723 crore, modernising fleets in places that had relied on ageing and overcrowded vehicles. For many residents, these buses were the first tangible sign that urban renewal was reaching them.

Housing and services for the urban poor 🔗

The BSUP sub-mission promised low-income residents what was described as a garland of seven entitlements: secure tenure, affordable housing, water, sanitation, health, education, and social security. In practice it became largely a housing programme, but it still produced hundreds of thousands of dwelling units for slum dwellers. Research on cities such as Pune showed that outcomes were best where local governments upgraded settlements in place and worked with civil society organisations rather than relocating people to distant sites.

Pushing governance reforms 🔗

Perhaps the most lasting achievement was institutional. Because funds were tied to reforms, states and municipalities were nudged to adopt measures they had long resisted: accrual-based accounting, property tax reform, e-governance, and steps towards implementing the 74th Constitutional Amendment on local self-government. The Ministry even introduced performance awards recognising urban local bodies that strengthened governance and service delivery. These changes built administrative muscle that later schemes could draw on.

Ongoing challenges and gaps 🔗

For all its scale, JNNURM fell short of its own promises in several important ways, and these shortcomings shaped how its successor programmes were designed.

Slow fund utilisation and incomplete projects 🔗

Money moved more slowly than planned. Central assistance was released in instalments, tied to utilisation certificates and the achievement of reform milestones, so delays at the city level held up funding. The clearest sign of trouble was the backlog of unfinished work: when the scheme wound down, about 398 projects remained incomplete because of delays in land acquisition, a shortage of contractors, and court cases. Sewerage projects in some cities became non-starters simply because municipalities could not afford to buy the land they needed.

Reforms that stalled midway 🔗

The reform agenda, which was supposed to be the engine of the Mission, lost momentum. The Planning Commission noted that the pace and depth of reforms needed to pick up, and that the 5 per cent of funds earmarked for capacity building could have been used far more effectively. Over time, many cities treated JNNURM mainly as a source of grants for stand-alone projects, with the reform conditions slipping into the background. The link between money and meaningful change weakened.

Projects over holistic planning 🔗

A related criticism was that the Mission stayed focused on individual projects rather than the integrated renewal of a city. Although every city produced a City Development Plan, the appraisal found that the emphasis on long-term planning and genuine urban renewal lagged behind project execution. A new water plant or a fleet of buses helps, but it does not by itself make a city more liveable if land use, transport, and services are not planned together.

Future directions for urban renewal 🔗

The lessons from JNNURM were absorbed directly into the schemes that followed. In 2015 the government launched the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, or AMRUT, described as the new avatar of JNNURM, covering 500 cities with an allocation of ₹50,000 crore. AMRUT 2.0 followed in 2021. These newer missions explicitly built on the foundation JNNURM laid while trying to fix its weak points.

Rethinking how funds and reforms connect 🔗

One key change was the way reforms were incentivised. Where JNNURM retained 10 per cent of central assistance as a penalty for not completing reforms, AMRUT instead set aside 10 per cent as a reward for states and cities that did implement them. Switching from punishment to incentive reflected the hard lesson that withholding money tends to stall projects rather than speed up reform.

Giving states more control 🔗

AMRUT also reduced central micromanagement. Instead of seeking approval from New Delhi for each project, states now submit annual action plans and progress reports, with funds released against milestones. This responded directly to the bottlenecks that had left so many JNNURM projects incomplete.

Looking ahead, the priorities for genuine urban renewal are reasonably clear. Cities need stronger municipal finances so they can maintain assets after central grants end, faster and fairer land acquisition, real planning that ties infrastructure to land use, and meaningful participation by elected local governments rather than control by parastatals alone. The High Powered Expert Committee estimated that urban infrastructure would require investment running into tens of lakhs of crores over two decades, a figure that dwarfs even the combined outlays of the schemes that came after JNNURM. Closing that gap, while keeping cities inclusive for the poor, remains the central task.

What do you think? Was JNNURM’s reform-linked funding model the right way to push reluctant cities to change, or did tying money to conditions simply slow down projects that people urgently needed? And if you were redesigning a national urban mission today, would you prioritise building infrastructure quickly or strengthening the municipal institutions that have to run it for decades?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru_National_Urban_Renewal_Mission
2. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/jawaharlal-nehru-national-urban-missio/
3. https://cpiml.net/liberation/2007/07/jnnurm-neo-liberal-mission-indian-cities
4. https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=81775
5. https://www.gktoday.in/jawaharlal-nehru-national-urban-renewal_06/
6. https://www.environmentandurbanization.org/understanding-contribution-bsup-jnnurm-inclusive-cities-india
7. http://durgapurmunicipalcorporation.in/achievement.php
8. https://www.deccanherald.com/india/amrut-empowers-states-urban-growth-2126588
9. https://nagarnigamraipur.nic.in/sites/default/files/amrut.pdf
10. https://thesecretariat.in/article/better-funding-decentralised-governance-inclusive-design-hold-key-to-amrut-s-success