COMMONWEALTH GAMES (CWG) NEW DELHI 2010

And finally the CWG is on! It got inaugurated on the third of October jointly by The Prince of Wales, Charles (representing his mother, The Queen of England) and The President of India, Madam Pratibha Patil. My family and I sat through to watch the full inauguration on the TV. The organizers had worked hard to make the inaugural function colorful. To a large extend, they had succeeded in it.

CWG New Delhi 2010 has been the major news item for the last few months for all its negative (majority) and positive (Minimum) news. Probably, the good show at the inauguration will rub off some of the negatives. The smooth conduct of the games during the next fortnight would probably take away all the bad publicity that the organizers had been receiving from all quarters. Finally, everybody had been forced to involve in the project, the PM, the Council of Ministers, the Bureaucrats and the Army; in addition to the sports administrators who were originally handling the affairs.

As an Indian, I am happy that Indian could hold the Commonwealth games. It is after 28 years that an international sports extravaganza of complex nature is coming to the country. The only nation outside England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand who hosted CWG had been Malaysia. Slowly, Indian aspirations are coming to the fore. With this, maybe now India could aspire to hold the Olympics in the near future!

One of the Special Director Generals of the CWG, while presenting the games to an invited audience in Cochin months ago, had said about the opening ceremony of the games that the ceremony itself would be a INR 200 Crore function. Since then on, as a citizen of India, I had been feeling guilty of the lavish ceremonies being planned in the name of the prestige of the nation. Two hundred crore Rupees is too much of money. Spending the same on a single function is quite ostentatious, I felt. In a country where a substantial percentage of people are living below poverty line, with so many Indians going hungry every day, I felt it as criminal to throw away such huge amount of money. No doubt, CWG is a prestigious thing but does it call for spending this huge a sum for the inauguration? The function was akin to our rich politicians or corporate leaders spending lavish amount of black money for the marriage of their children.

There is also another side to the story. And that is about the rampant corruption that the organizers had been indulging during the makeup of CWG 2010. If the media reports were to be believed, more than fifty percent of the allocated amount had gone into the pockets of the organizers, middlemen and their cronies. Does that include the Chairman of the organizing Committee? Who knows?

With such rampant corruption and ostentatious spending, the question to ask is whether India really deserves to hold the CWG 2010. If we reduced the splendor of opening ceremony by half, would we have received flaks? Can you belive, it costs INR 40 crores to fill Helium in that floating platform!

It is not that growing India should not take up such projects. We must and we should show the world our capabilities. The only thought is whether we could get the projects done without cost overlay and without corruption and of course, by applying experience, wisdom and with cost optimization in mind. Many often, these things are camouflaged to amass wealth by the concerned. Only recently have we been reading about one Lait Modi and his rag to riches story through the IPL league. As India progresses, one is saddened to see the color and quantity of corruption also going up.

There must be accountability. Today, that is the last thing to come by in India. And so long as accountability takes the back seat, whatever we saw and heard about CWG, IPL etc would continue to happen.

And that indeed is very shameful for growing India!