Needed: action, not words

Mr Kalmadi should shut up and get on with the job

Suresh Kalmadi is proving a national embarrassment. As the head of the Organising Committee of the Commonwealth Games 2010, he has been in charge of getting the show organised. Till date, the Committee (which came into existence in early 2005) has a plethora of missed deadlines to show for its labours. The Commonwealth Games Federation has raised one warning flag after another, culminating last week in the demand for more comprehensive oversight by international experts. Relations between the Committee and the Federation have since reached a nadir, with Mr Kalmadi rejecting the Federation’s diktat and asking publicly for the removal of the Federation’s man on the spot; that gent’s response at a press conference was halted abruptly by the intervention of people who appear to have been acting on Mr Kalmadi’s behalf. Recent reports have suggested that Mr Kalmadi is incensed at the vast sums he is paying for hiring international experts (Rs 100 crore, says one report), and the pressure being brought on the Organising Committee to hand out lucrative marketing contracts to international agents who so far have not delivered. This is the usual peddling of international conspiracy theories in a bid to ratchet up nationalist sentiment; the primary problem is that Mr Kalmadi and his Committee have not delivered so far, and everyone is now expected to simply accept his promises of just-in-time delivery.

The government seems to have bestirred itself rather late in the day, even though it has been clear for a long time that the multiple agencies involved in the preparatory work needed a central coordinator. Earlier this year, it finally set up a Group of Ministers to bring about inter-agency coordination. And last week a new chief executive was appointed to the Organising Committee, over and above the existing director-general — which suggests that the government itself is no longer sure that Mr Kalmadi’s Committee will deliver without extra help. If the country is to have the confidence that preparations for the Games will be ready in time, and that more deadlines will not be missed, the Committee must publicly announce the progressive deadlines for each of dozens of projects, up to the stage of completion, and the ticking off of those deadlines when they have been met.