News published in Deccan chronicle Dt. September 26th, 2010 :
Humiliation”, “ineptitude”, “corruption” and “filth” are not the sort of adjectives one expects to see or hear repeated ad nauseum days before India embarks on its biggest sports event in almost three decades.
Yet with the 19th edition of the Commonwealth Games just seven days away, these were the most frequently used words in the public domain thanks to the unnerving inability of the country's sports administrators to get their act together with D-Day having been decided almost eight years earlier.
India will have splashed out in excess of Rs 70,000 crores for this extravaganza, building — or rather, rebuilding — a raft of stadia for the CWG and desperately pushing through a myriad of development projects in the host city, Delhi. From an initial budget estimate of about Rs 617 crore when India were first awarded the Games in December of 2002, costs rose steadily and will peak at around the Rs 71,000-crore mark.
This mammoth escalation represents an unheard of inflation, more than a hundred times the initial costing for the 12-day Games that will finally see almost 7,000 participants descend on the national capital. At the end of it all, if we get a show to remember - which is still possible given India's native genius of jugaad - it may still be bearable. But what we and much of the English-speaking world has instead been exposed to is a litany of hyperbole, false assurances and downright lies. At every step, costs have risen beyond rational expectation, and delivery has never matched promise.
Leaky stadia, falling roofs, collapsing structures and unmet deadlines have been the hallmark of the run-up to these Games. Presiding over all of this are a group of administrators who have run pell-mell at the power and pelf on offer, but have happily shirked any scent of responsibility, be it sports minister M.S. Gill, Indian Olympic Association boss Suresh Kalmadi, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dixit or any one of a number of sticky-fingered officials. And then there is the nightmarish spectacle of uncouth administrators justifying their complete lack of preparation by some remarkable verbal contortions that in effect implied the Indians were a dirty lot and they - these amazing administrators - were being asked to walk an extra mile because of the unreasonable goras, who apparently have a different standard of hygiene than ours. One would have liked to see the reaction of the wives of these two men if they had tried to pull this spiel at home.
As it stands, the Games Village - home to the 7,000-odd visitors participating in CWG 19 -needed desperate attention by an army of cleaners, plumbers, electricians, painters and house-keeping staff before their quarters were made liveable. What will happen at the stadia when thousands of spectators pour in to watch some worth-class athletes, swimmers, boxers, wrestlers and hockey players in action is another matter altogether.
Here too the omens are not happy. Last week, a footbridge linking the Nehru Stadium - venue of the opening and closing ceremonies, the athletics events and weightlifting competition - to a nearby parking area went down even as it was being erected. This, in turn, raises the prospects of a nightmare scenario bringing the structural stability of other such rush jobs into question.
At the end of it all, if the residents of Delhi are to get access to these “world class” facilities, it may still have been worth the expense and time, but even that is uncertain given what happened in the aftermath of Asiad 1982, when expensive stadia were allowed to fall into disrepair because there were no plans for what to do with them after the Games ended.
The biggest - indeed bitterest - irony is that this massive expense on 12 days of competition is coming out of the purse of a nation where anything between 50 per cent to 70 per cent of the population (depending on whose figures you want to believe) are hard put to earn a measly Rs 20 a day on average.
Contrast all this with China’s preparations for the Asian Games in Guangzhou from November 12 to 27, where all has been in readiness for close to six months already. Groups of sports officials, journalists and other experts have been flown in - first to suggest improvements and changes - and thereafter inspect the final preparations almost six months in advance. The Asiad organisers too have spend massively, but most of the money has gone into greenfield facilities that gives yet another Chinese city world class sporting facilities after Beijing, Shanghai and a few others.
If only we could have learnt some lessons from those across the Himalayas before throwing away such a large percentage of those Rs 71,000 crores, it may have been a very different story here too.
News published in Deccan chronicle Dt. September 26th, 2010 : original link in headline above.
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