T N Ninan: Snafu

For all one knows, the Commonwealth Games may go off without a hitch. How much that will repair the damage already done to Brand India is a matter of guesswork. All that can be said just now is that if the Games were to be a coming-out party for the country, it has been a botched affair.

The more important question is whether the “misfeasance, malfeasance and non-feasance” (to borrow a phrase from the classic film, Front Page) that have been on display are special to the Games organisers, or typical of the system. When Mr Bhanot uttered his immortal line (“My hygiene and cleanliness standards may be different from theirs”), was he saying more than he knew? What, after all, is the state of our public toilets (few as they are)? What toilet facilities are made available to the many thousands of pilgrims who make their way to Amarnath and Sabarimala every year? By all accounts, they are worse than “filthy” and “unliveable”. Mr Bhanot, you hit the bull’s eye.

As for missed deadlines and ramped up costs, how come our TV anchors don’t go hysterical at the trebling of the bill for Delhi airport’s new Terminal 3? Or cry “scandal” when the Delhi chief minister stalls the electricity regulator’s report that calls for a cut in Delhi’s power tariffs? Or cry “national shame” when most of the country suffers long power cuts every day? If all it takes for public consciousness to be raised to fever pitch is for Mr Hooper and Mr Fennell to periodically address the press and use some choice epithets and seek meetings with the prime minister — who then bestirs himself to call daily review meetings — perhaps we should hire these gentlemen as citizens’ voices.

In other words, what the Games preparations have shown up in terms of “misfeasance, malfeasance and non-feasance” is what is normal and everyday when it comes to the functioning of our governments — which explains why Sheila Dikshit dismisses the collapse of a foot overbridge (the lead story on the front page in newspapers in half a dozen countries) as a minor issue, and why Jaipal Reddy is able to say that as far as he is concerned the work of the group of ministers overseeing Games preparations was over a week ago. This when New Delhi’s showpiece city centre remains in an unbelievable shambles, the Shivaji Stadium work will remain incomplete even when the Games are over, and no one hears anything about the special metro line to the airport that was sanctioned as a Games project.

What has been obvious for some time is that, even as India’s private sector has got better (more effective, more innovative, and more technologically accomplished), the government’s ability to deliver — whether it is social infrastructure like public health and education, physical infrastructure like electricity, a public distribution system that reaches the poor and new technology for agriculture — has steadily deteriorated. We could organise the Asian Games in 1982; we can’t organise the Commonwealth Games in 2010.

But what gives one sleepless nights is the worry that the same government might be approaching India’s defence preparedness with the same incompetence and corruption — even as China builds new roads and railway lines up to the border, and places more powerful missiles on the Tibetan plateau. The government’s own representatives have written despairingly about the state of the country’s border roads, defence hardware acquisitions miss target dates repeatedly, and allocations are unspent year after year, even as the defence budget has been squeezed to the lowest level (in relation to GDP) since 1962. Risking international embarrassment is bad enough; what about risking national security? And what kind of wake-up call do we need on that front?