The Fennell effect

The Games mess reflects the norm in govt functioning

After the head of the Commonwealth Games Federation, Michael Fennell, held out the veiled threat of taking away the Games from India (due to be held in October next year), the government has been in a tizzy. Central ministers Suresh Kalmadi and MS Gill and Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit have quickly gone on record to say that things will fall into place well in time. That is, of course, a lot better than earlier ministerial statements, which likened the Games to an Indian wedding where everything remains fluid till all the pieces fall into place at the last minute. This is an odd way to explain away delays of several months, and is in fact a way of escaping a proper debate on what has gone wrong and why. It is a sorry thought that the government’s ability to deliver has not improved in the 27 years since the Asian Games of 1982. Then too, preparations were behind schedule, and the situation was saved only after the government tasked Jagmohan with getting things in order. Eventually, the games were held successfully, and it is possible that the Commonwealth Games will be too.

So far, however, there is no sign of any latterday Jagmohan who will get the various projects back on track and keep them there. In any case, the Games should be getting organised without any heroics from individuals; they should be the product of organised effort by many people doing their jobs properly. In that sense, the chaos of the preparatory work is representative of so much of what the government does: shoddy, behind schedule, ridden with controversy, and afflicted by corruption. The highway programme, for instance, had run aground until Kamal Nath appeared on the scene; the rural employment guarantee programme is riddled with leakages that no one wants to talk about because it is a flagship programme of the ruling alliance; the multi-faceted Bharat Nirman programme is well behind schedule on almost every target it had set; and so on. The country accepts these failings and keeps moving on, so it all becomes a part of “normalcy”. Until the potential embarrassment of losing the Commonwealth Games becomes a real threat, and suddenly everyone is focusing on what needs to get done.

So what went wrong? In the case of the Barapullah Elevated Road which is the main road link between the Games village (where the athletes will be staying) and the main venue for sporting events, it took six years to get the clearances to build the road. The Games Village ran into environmental hurdles and a court case. The Delhi government is not in charge of the city’s municipal corporation, though no one can explain why the central government should be in charge of a municipal corporation. It is a tragedy, and a shame, if it takes a threat from the head of an international sports body for those in the government to start getting their act together—and only in the one area where the threat has been made. For the rest, it will remain business as usual.