Every young player in Jammu knows a ground that exists on paper. The one behind the school with a gate that is always locked. The indoor hall that was inaugurated and never opened. The field that is technically a playfield and functionally a car park.
Nobody has ever had a list. That is what is being built now.
At a review on 19 August, the Commissioner/Secretary of Youth Services & Sports, Dr Shahid Iqbal Choudhary, directed a full district-wise assessment of every playfield, stadium and indoor facility in Jammu and Kashmir, along with the mapping and geotagging of existing assets. District Youth Services and Sports Officers from across the UT attended, with Director General Anuradha Gupta.
The money already committed
The audit is not an academic exercise. It sits on top of a pipeline that is already funded:
210 new sports projects under the capital expenditure programme
17 projects under the Special Assistance to States for Capital Investment scheme
Over ₹500 crore in cumulative investment
Around ₹160 crore released so far
Officers were told to expedite tendering and complete work within approved timelines — the standing problem with sports infrastructure in the UT being not sanction, but the gap between sanction and a usable surface.
Why an audit is the interesting part
A funding announcement tells you what is coming. A geotagged inventory tells you what is already there and whether anyone can get into it — and that is the harder question.
The directive explicitly covers identification of infrastructure gaps and underserved areas. In practice that means the exercise is designed to surface two different failures: districts and blocks with no facility at all, and facilities that exist but are unmaintained, locked, or effectively reserved for a single institution.
If you have grown up playing in Jammu, you will recognise the second category immediately. It has never appeared in any official count, because official counts record construction, not use.
The line worth reading twice
Among the directions issued was one that officers should involve local youth and sporting communities at the planning stage.
That is a small sentence with a real opening inside it. Decisions about which ground gets resurfaced, which hall gets equipment and which block gets the next facility have historically been made without anyone asking the people who would use them. A college team, a neighbourhood club or a district association that turns up to its District Youth Services and Sports Officer with a specific, documented case now has a stated reason to be heard.
Whether that happens depends entirely on whether anyone shows up. This is the kind of provision that quietly lapses if nobody uses it.
Where the money is coming from
Two funding streams sit behind the pipeline, and they behave differently. The 210 new projects run on the capital expenditure programme under Centrally Sponsored Schemes — the routine annual channel for building and upgrading facilities. The other 17 projects come through SASCI, the Special Assistance to States for Capital Investment scheme, which lends states and UTs money for capital work on long interest-free terms.
The distinction matters for anyone trying to work out whether a promised ground will appear. SASCI money is tied to capital creation and comes with its own drawdown timetable; CapEx projects move at the pace of the department’s own tendering. Of the ₹500 crore-plus committed, roughly ₹160 crore has actually been released — under a third. The instruction to expedite tendering is aimed squarely at that gap, because unspent sanction is the form failure usually takes here.
What a club or college can do with this
If the planning-stage consultation is going to mean anything, it needs people arriving with specifics rather than complaints. Three things travel well:
A named facility and what is wrong with it. "The indoor hall at X has no functioning lights" is actionable in a way that "we need better facilities" is not.
A count of who would use it. Registered players, school teams, weekly footfall — whatever you can evidence. Underserved-area assessments run on numbers.
The competition it feeds. A ground that supports a district championship or a national selection trial has a stronger claim than one that does not, because it connects to the department’s own calendar.
Your District Youth Services and Sports Officer is the entry point — the same office that runs the inter-zonal and inter-school selection trials across Jammu district each year.
What Jammu should watch for
Three things will show whether this becomes real:
Does the geotagged map become public? An internal inventory helps the department. A published one lets a player in Bishnah or Akhnoor see what their district actually has and ask why.
Do the underserved areas named turn out to be the ones players would name? The outer blocks of Jammu district, and the smaller towns across the belt, are where the gap is most obvious on the ground.
Does "utilisation" get measured at all? A facility counted as existing and a facility counted as open to you are different numbers, and only one of them matters to a seventeen-year-old looking for somewhere to train.
The context this sits in
J&K has spent two years signalling that sport is a serious route rather than a hobby — through the sports-quota recruitment that put 223 athletes into government jobs, through nine free academies of excellence at Khel Gaon, and through a steady run of national-level competitions hosted in the UT. Infrastructure has been the weakest link in that chain: talent identification programmes keep finding players in places with nowhere adequate to train them.
An honest inventory is an unglamorous fix. It is also the one that has to come first, because you cannot close a gap you have never measured.
Sources: Greater Kashmir and The Kashmir Horizon, reporting the Youth Services & Sports review of 19 August 2026.
