A LEADING Indian business lobby group has expressed concern over the possibility of the country’s humiliation because of incomplete and shoddy preparations for the looming Commonwealth Games in the capital New Delhi.
“I must confess we are deeply concerned,” Amit Mitra, general secretary of the Federation of India Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said earlier this week amid a raft of embarrassing publicity surrounding incomplete Games arrangements.
Intended as a global showcase for India’s rise as a major economic power and a potential 21st-century financial giant rivalling China, the Games, featuring 71 Commonwealth nations, remain a shambles nine days before their October 3rd inauguration with organisers scrambling frantically to somehow get things completed.
A number of athletes have withdrawn amid security and health fears, while the unfinished, shabby and filthy athletes’ village, leaking stadiums and poor roads and infrastructure have badly sullied India’s “coming out” sporting carnival.
However, Northern Ireland followed England, Wales and Scotland last night in giving their athletes approval to travel to the Games. Northern Irelands Commonwealth Games Council said they were satisfied conditions had improved sufficiently.
"These incidents are definitely going to showcase a bad image for the country," leading steel magnate Ratan Jindal told the Economic Times. "We all know we are not so well-organised and work is done at the last moment in our country," he added.
India and Delhi have had seven years to prepare for the Games, but the serious work began only in 2008. The cost, estimated at less than $100 million (€73m) in 2003, has skyrocketed, with final estimates ranging from $6-12 billion (€4-8 billion), making them the most expensive Games to date.
Government expenditure monitoring and anti-corruption agencies had in various audits claimed widespread wrongdoing, corruption, the use of poor quality material for sporting venues and buildings which were entirely untested.
“The negativity surrounding the Games is due principally to India’s venal and inefficient leadership,” analyst Lala Virendra Kapoor said.
“There is nothing positive that can be said about them. They have exposed all that is intrinsically wrong with the country – corruption, nepotism, a regressive bureaucracy and complete indifference to the plight of the underprivileged and poor.”
This latter assertion starkly manifested itself in the off-hand treatment meted out to 27 labourers who were injured, five of them seriously, when a footbridge leading to the main Games stadium collapsed on Tuesday.
Labour welfare organisations and leading trade unions demonstrated yesterday in their support, claiming most had not been paid for months by contractors who, in cahoots with unscrupulous government officials, earned huge profits.
Trade unionists said most workers employed in the Games were forced by poverty into working in unsafe and unhygienic conditions with no support from government agencies who treated them little better than “disposable and replaceable commodities”.
Shortly after Tuesday’s accident, relieved senior officials publicly celebrated the fact that “only labourers” had been injured.
More than 40 workers have died in Games-related construction accidents over the past two years.
Top Indian and foreign diplomats said the country’s image, assiduously built up over the past two decades as a burgeoning financial, industrial and information technology powerhouse, stood “badly neutralised” by the embarrassment surrounding the discomforting run-up to the Games.
“Preparations for the Games have exposed the country’s soft underbelly and punctured the myth of a shining India,” a Western diplomat said, declining to be identified. It had revealed India’s grave shortcomings under the thin veneer of economic resurgence that benefited a few, he added. However, some believe that once the Games begin and sport takes over, the focus will shift to one of vigour and achievement – provided, of course, that no accident or security incident marred the show.