:: Editorial

Games 2010: Stop drift, take charge

Oct.14 : It might have been more fruitful if the implied tongue-lashing administered by Mike Fennell, president of the Commonwealth Games Federation, to the Suresh Kalmadi-led organising committee now racing against the clock to put up even a passable show in October 2010, had come a year earlier. Perhaps then there might have been reason to be sanguine that arrangements will not suffer in quality. It is doubtful now if anyone who knows the working of the Indian system, and its dubious record in erecting and maintaining public infrastructure, can be a hundred per cent certain. At the end of a six-day review of the state of preparations for the forthcoming New Delhi Games, the CGF chief, in India along with delegates from 71 countries, did not fail to announce the setting up of a technical committee comprising international experts that will give monthly reports. "We can’t afford any more slippage", Mr Fennell declared. How much nicer if the admonition had come from the highest levels within the country, and such an expert group constituted, after the CGF president addressed a letter to our Prime Minister about a month ago expressing dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. In words that will sting for a long time, Mr Fennell told a New Delhi press conference: "When it was two years to go for the Delhi Games, I told the OC that time was not its friend. With one year to go, now I say that time is your enemy."

Mr Fennell has aptly said the CGF can "express its concerns and offer its advice, but it is the OC, along with the governments of India and Delhi, who have the responsibility of organising the Delhi 2010 Games". This is a call to arms for the Centre as well as the city government. In reality, it is India’s prestige that is on the line, not that of the OC, whose lackadaisical attitude so far cannot inspire confidence. For protocol and technical reasons, the OC perhaps cannot be jettisoned at this stage. But it’s time an effective way is found to take the day-to-day responsibility of making and supervising arrangements out of its hands. Perhaps a group of dedicated administrators, contractors, architects, multi-discipline engineers and other technical experts has to be rigged out of thin air and given a mandate from the highest levels to ensure that lost time is made up and India delivers the Delhi Games not only on schedule but to the satisfaction of India itself. The OC can be asked to provide the formal signatures. The defeatism of Union sports minister M.S. Gill just won’t do. He has been reported as saying: "This is not Melbourne, this is not Glasgow. Delhi is a city of 15 million people... It has all the problems that great cities have..." While we break a sweat trying to reconfigure ourselves to deliver a product we can be proud of, we cannot fail to be unmindful of design and aesthetics. Shera, the Games mascot, which has passed muster with the OC, is not fit to be classified even as kitsch.

The bureaucracy, police and other administrators in charge of running Delhi’s affairs can’t even fix a drain, a manhole, a traffic signal. Any new ideas they have offered in recent years on roads, flyovers and traffic have been poorly functioning eyesores. The second-rung politicians who have grabbed plum positions on sports bodies have brought to the task at hand their slipshod culture, and loads of emphasis of venality, favouritism, factionalism, and fixing. Excellence can never be a byproduct, whatever the midgets may believe. Mr Fennell has done us a favour by reminding us of that.