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Recently, the Union Territory (UT) of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has decided to shift only sensitive records from Jammu to Srinagar in the summer, breaking the century and a half old tradition of the Durbar Move.
Traditional Durbar Move
- It is a bi-annual shifting of the Civil Secretariat and other offices of the government from Jammu to Srinagar in summer, and vice versa in winter.
- This is done as J&K has two capitals: Kashmir during summer and Jammu during winter.
- The tradition was reportedly started in the late 19th century by Ranbir Singh, a Dogra ruler of Jammu and Kashmir.
- He hailed from Jammu, but had expanded the boundaries to Kashmir including what is now Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and Ladakh.
Rationale Behind the Shifting
- Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh are very different from one another geographically, linguistically and culturally, and were poorly connected by road in older days.
- The Durbar Move was started to take the administration to the doorstep of the people of Kashmir which is closer to Ladakh. During summer, ruling from Kashmir also helped in ensuring adequate supplies to Ladakh, which is closer to Kashmir than Jammu, before the winter snowfall would cut off Ladakh.
- The practice also enabled greater interaction and bonding among the people of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh.
Concerns Highlighted
- In the late 1980s, protests started over the amount of money and time spent on the exercise, however, the move against it had to be scrapped due to the public support for the tradition.
- In 2020, the J&K High Court (HC) observed that there was no legal justification or constitutional basis for this tradition.
- It observed that the practise has resulted in wastage of tremendous amount of time, efforts and energy on inefficient and unnecessary activity.
- The Division Bench also observed that valuable resources of the state (financial and physical) cannot be diverted to completely non-essential usage when the UT is unable to provide even basic essentials to its people.
- Upon rationalisation, the resources and time could be utilised towards the welfare and development of the UT and can address issues like food shortage, unemployment and healthcare.
- It needs too much effort by the security forces and nurtures inefficiency and leads to lack of governance.
- It causes delay in justice dispensation as government records are not available to the pleaders in one region for six months at a time.
- The valuable and sensitive government documents and resources of the UT are put to tremendous risk in the process of their transportation.
- The time taken in the whole exercise of shifting impacts the process of timely policy formulations and implementations leading to slow growth and development of the region.
About the Latest Move
- Only sensitive records will be taken from Jammu to Srinagar for summer 2021, unlike in previous years when the entire administration and records would be shifted.
- The UT government has decided to switch to e-governance and all the official records will be converted into digital format.
- As a result, only the Secretariat employees and some offices will make the move along with the sensitive records.
Source: IE
