Common Wealth Games 2010 - Boon or Bane?

When unexpected guests arrived at the Sharma household for dinner, Mrs. Sharma was in a fix as she had prepared food enough only for her family of four. As the guests sat with the Sharma family for dinner, Mrs. Sharma nudged Chintu quiet for asking for a second helping of rajma and pinched Bunty under the table when he wanted more rice.


This is what happens, doesn’t it when you have to provide more than you can? In such a situation one is left with only two options – either provide the newcomers with less than what they want, or you yourself consume less to let the guests have their fill. But in India, keeping with the tradition of “Atithi Devo Bhava”(Guest is God), it’s the latter that generally happens.

Such is the condition of New Delhi around 8 months before the Opening Ceremony of the Common Wealth Games, 2010. India, a third world company was so obsessed with portraying New Delhi as a ‘world class city’ with ‘international standards’ that it forgot to take into account the other more pressing needs of the economy.

True, India is looking to emerge a superpower and needs to assert its abilities onto the keenly watching world. But at what cost? Twisted values are all that are on show when one advertises the upcoming five-star hotels in the newspaper along with reports of famine like conditions in other regions of the world.

History tells us that hosting such mega events may be more of a burden than an honour, especially for developing countries. All recent Summer Games with the sole exception of the 1984 Los Angeles Games have lost money. The citizens of Munich continue to pay a special tax to this day, to pay off debt incurred in the 1976 Games. This is very often not revealed to the public by using smart accounting techniques that do not include a lot of the costs incurred under direct games expenditure. After the $200 million profit that L.A. made on the games in ’84, they have been increasingly looked upon as extremely profitable, though LA’s performance is yet to be replicated.

The Delhi Metro, flyovers and the renovated Airport are no doubt the better things to come out of the preparation for the Games. But bureaucracy and lack of initiative ensure that many of the ‘world class facilities’ (like the new stadiums, Games Village being built) are underutilized or inefficiently used. One doesn’t have to look far for an example – 3 new stadiums built for the Asian Games held in Delhi in 1982 have never been utilized to their full potential even once after the Games, serving as a hub more for Bollywood events and political rallies than sporting events. The commendable Games Village built for the Asian Games was later taken over by the government officials for their own housing purposes. As for the Metro and other facilities, they too would have been built even without the Games in sight. Maybe not at such a rapid pace but they would have been built all the same. The recently opened Metro stretch to Noida has come in for more criticism than praise because of various technical snags that keep occurring. It just goes on to show the demerits of trying to hustle through things that require more time.

Though the Asian Games of 1982 brought about great development in Delhi, one could see more drawbacks in the greatly awaited mega event. The huge exodus of labourers from rural villages to Delhi(about 10 lakh people) for the construction of various infrastructure were never given any future means of income after the Games were over. They continued to live in shanties they had been given to live in when construction for the games was still in process, till they were finally driven away by the Government. Till date, they continue to further increase the already swelling slums of Delhi.

A lot has changed since 1982, and yet a lot remains the same. It was just 2 years before the Asian Games that the Indian government woke up to the amount of work that was required to be done before the Games commenced and Rajiv Gandhi made it his personal mission to ensure that the games were carried out successfully. Though, he managed to do a commendable job, many planning and precautionary measures were ignored in order to be ready before the deadline.

The Player’s building was never completed, nor was the roof of the Talkatora swimming pool. The retracting roof of the Indira Gandhi indoor stadium hailed as a technological feat never worked effectively and even after numerous repairs, the roof still leaks. An international Badminton competition in the 1990’s was disrupted due to water leaking in. The main stadium, built on the banks of the Yamuna is actually tilting on one side. The Delhi High Court also sealed the main portion of the stadium, as it does not fulfil fire safety norms (Venugopal, A. 2005). The adjoining Yamuna Velodrome is in a pathetic state with the velodrome full of cracks and bumps, and more often visited by snakes and rats than humans. The Nehru Stadium too is crumbling and bad maintenance means that even though new tracks were laid recently, they are already in disrepair.

Similar are the conditions this time round. In fact, a year before the Games, the Common Wealth Federation was seriously considering taking the Games out of New Delhi due the lackluster improvements that were being made. As is the work tradition in India that no one works until they have a deadline hanging over their necks like a sword, similar is the case with the work in preparation of the Games. Though the city may be made out to be ready in time for the Games in 2010, the work done behind the scenes will be shoddy and make-shift, which will be of no use to the economy once the Games are over.

India is once again vastly unprepared in the wake of the Games. Almost every sector under construction, be it transport, hospitality, sporting facilities, power generation, all are struggling to meet the deadline for the Games. Various delays, time lags and unplanned synchronization are the reasons that India nearly lost the Common Wealth Games and is still under the risk of not managing to host the third largest multi-sport event efficiently.

One can only hope that the city will be benefitted by the Games which will set the foundation for future developments that will one day make New Delhi truly a ‘world class city’. And, we will not be plagued by the after affects as was the case with the Asian Games nearly 3 decades back and another 10 lakh would not be added to the perennially increasing slums of Delhi.



Source:



1982. Turnout for Games Lags, New Delhi Paper Says. The New York Times. November 26.

Baviskar, A. 2005. A lifeline … under siege. The Hindu, November 06.

Gibson, H. J. 1998. Sport Tourism: A Critical Analysis of Research. Sport Management Review, 1998, 1, 45–76

Roy, S. 2006. See you in Delhi….No, not yet. The Indian Express, April 02.

My Mother Always

My mother always is the best cook,

She knows by heart every recipe book

From six in the morn to ten in the night

She will be in the kitchen putting things right.

Pasta, pizza or a burger

She knows how to blow away my hunger.

Before breakfast, after supper or way past my bedtime,

She will always make a snack for me anytime.

One fine morning, I heard a shout,

My mother had her hand on her mouth.

A small rat had jumped into the pot of boiling soup.

It writhed and shrieked before dying in the coup.

The image of the dead rat stayed always in my mother’s mind

I never again saw her cook a thing right;

My mother always was the best cook,

She used to know by heart every recipe book.

- Varnit Banthia