Delhi battling human and financial cost of hosting Commonwealth Games
The Indian host city is struggling to complete preparations for the event in the face of rising expenses and criticism of its methods
The signs around the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, named after India's first and longest-serving prime minister, are unequivocal: Work Is In Progress. The stadium is the centrepiece of the preparations for the Commonwealth Games, to be held in India's capital from 3-14 October. It now has its canopy style roof, track, main entrance. And, this being India and this being Delhi, it has its piles of dirt, strewn rubbish, uprooted trees, stacks of bricks.
Opposite, on what was once one of the few open spaces in this overcrowded city of 18 million, workmen are repairing the roof of the weightlifting hall following recent storms.
Nearby, more labourers sweat in the heat and humidity of the early monsoon to finish a Metro station and the elevated road that will allow athletes and officials to travel to the stadium from the £150m Games Village, still unfinished, without getting snarled in Delhi's appalling traffic. Many are women, carrying wicker baskets of cement on their heads.
Across the city the scene is the same: in the central Connaught Circus rickshaws manoeuvre between vast troughs of mud and construction equipment, work is continuing on almost all the major sports facilities, signs have yet to go up, the dedicated traffic lanes yet to be tested, approach roads are a mess of cables and gravel. The state of the art £2bn airport is open but the Metro linking it to the centre of town is not.
Earlier this year, the headlines in local newspapers about the Commonwealth Games or CWG as they are known in India were almost universally positive. This was the nation's opportunity to showcase its new power and influence as well as its ability to organise major sporting events. The world would learn that the Old India, that of chaos, poverty and delay, was gone. The New India, of the new middle classes, the 10% annual growth, the global software giants, was here.
"Once a sleepy backyard, the capital's image is being recast," said Outlook magazine. "Ahead of the Commonwealth Games, it's adding world-class facilities and slick services designed to leave the visitors awestruck."
A direct comparison with China was, if not explicit, very obvious. China is the other emerging Asian power and the Beijing Olympics were widely seen as a resounding success. For an editorial in the Asian Age last week "the breathtaking show" in Beijing in 2008 "more than confirmed China's position as a manufacturing megapower and the envy of other leading nations". There was talk of the Commonwealth Games being a springboard for an Indian bid for the 2024 Olympics. There is less such talk now.
The authorities running the Games and there are many of them have repeatedly sought to reassure. More recently, a note of anxiety has crept in however. "There is a cause to feel nervous. The biggest challenge is to ensure all Games facilities are completed on schedule. There is no doubt it has been stressful," the chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit, admitted.
It is not just the construction. The catering contracts have yet to be fully awarded. Sponsorship has been a struggle. The Queen has decided not to attend the opening ceremony, citing her travel schedule. And the number of A-list sporting stars who will not be coming is lengthening every day. It now includes the sprinters Usain Bolt and Veronica Campbell-Brown, cyclists Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendelton, Australian swimmer Cate Campbell, heptathlete Jessica Ennis and tennis players Andy Murray and Lleyton Hewitt, as well as the French Open finalist Samantha Stosur. "It is no big deal," Suresh Kalmadi, the chairman of the Organising Committee, said recently. "New stars will emerge from the Games."
It is likely that, as with the proverbial Indian wedding, it will all come together on the day. The opening ceremony, with music from the composer of the soundtrack to the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, will be impressive. City authorities have banned construction for a month, ensuring relatively clean air. The specially designated *** catchers will catch their rats. The cow herding squads will herd their cows, minimising the sacred animals' potential to snarl up even the best-laid plans. The terrorist threats will, probably, fail to materialise. The stadiums will stay up, there will be no stampedes and, despite the tardy award of the catering contracts, any food poisoning will be no more than the usual in a city that is a byword for travellers' gutrot.
The tourists will come although not in the epic numbers anticipated by the organisers. Medals will be won, records will be broken. The Games, though not perhaps "the best ever" as promised, will be a relative success.
The financial cost however will have been high. No one is exactly sure how much the Games will have cost but estimates run from £2bn to nearly £4bn, a third of the London Olympics, if the infrastructure projects are factored in. They will be the most expensive Commonwealth Games ever. The original budget approved by the Indian government back in April 2007 was £500m. The price tag has provoked much discussion over the country's priorities.
Leaving aside what could have been done with the same amount of cash elsewhere in a country where child mortality rates are the highest in the world and an estimated 700 million do not have access to a toilet, there is the direct human cost. Campaigners claim nearly 100 construction workers have died on Commonwealth Games sites, from accidents or contagious illness contracted in the insalubrious and crowded camps set up as temporary accommodation. Hundreds more, they say, have been injured. A February report by a Delhi high court-appointed committee said workers at Games sites earned inadequate wages and received no health benefits or safety gear.
Although, contrary to reports, there are almost no very young children working on the sites, several thousand 12- to 14-year-olds are employed, in breach of rarely enforced regulations. Most come from some of the most deprived parts of India states such as Bihar where poverty levels are often worse than in much of sub-Saharan Africa and are often simply pleased to have a job. "If I wasn't doing this I'd be stitching shoes. At least here I am outside and I am learning a trade," said Sanjit Kumar, 13, an apprentice mason working at Nehru Stadium this year.
Those who have paid the heaviest price for the Games are perhaps the slum dwellers who were either living on land needed for construction for the Games or whose shabby homes mar the image of Delhi as a "world-class city", in the words of Dikshit. Many tens of thousands have been forcibly displaced.
When the athletes look out of their new apartments overlooking the river Yamuna the organisers hope winds will blow the stink generated by its heavily polluted water away from the complex they will see acres of vegetable farms. The poor migrants who worked the fields, hawking the produce in Delhi to make a meagre living, were forced out of their village in police operations last month. Some had lived there for nearly 20 years. The school attended by their children, run by a local NGO, was bulldozed.
There have been dozens of similar operations in recent months. Some of the displaced have been resettled on the outskirts of Delhi. Others have simply been left to live on the streets or, often in this city of immigrants, to return to their homes in the villages in the vast poor states that constitute the capital's hinterland. Around 3,000 beggars have been "removed" according to the Hindustan Times.
Those who cannot be shifted are instead hidden. On one of the main roads in from the airport likely to be used by many tourists and dignitaries, a row of hoardings now obscures slums from traffic.
Officials argue that such measures are a necessary part of good municipal planning. There is much talk of the legacy of the Games being a state of the art sporting infrastructure for Delhi's inhabitants.
But for Dunu Roy of the Hazards Centre, an independent thinktank that has analysed the economic cost of the Games, the money has been poorly spent. "These vast stadiums are not going to be used for the next 20 years unless they get another big tournament," Roy said. "For a fraction of the budget you could have provided every primary school in Delhi with a fully equipped playground, colleges could have had playing fields, you could have put sports academies all over the place."
Local opposition politicians are also concerned. "I have seen how stadiums are used in Europe but in Delhi people are not crazy about sport the same way," Subhash Arya, deputy chairman of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, said. "We have been asking for the plans of how they will be used after the Games for school children or newcomers but there is no planning at all for this."
The field opposite the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, now dominated by the new weightlifting complex, once saw a score of crowded, chaotic, overlapping cricket matches every evening. Now local teenagers jostle for space on the tiny patches of green scattered among local residential blocks.
Raj Kumar, 37, was playing cricket with his eight-year-old daughter and three-year-old son in the park across from where the cricket grounds once were. "We live nearby so we come to this park because it is a good exercise for children [to play cricket]. Not many people lift weights in India. Everyone plays cricket," he said. "The government should give another cricket ground for the kids."
Vipul Naweja, a chartered accountant who lives in the outlying town of Gurgaon, home to many of the corporate businesses, call centres and malls that symbolise "New India", disagreed, however. "It's OK they removed the cricket grounds because a big event is happening. They are destroying something, but creating something also," he said. "Some sacrifice is necessary for the sake of the country."
guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/aug/04/commonwealth-games-delhi-preparations