Games makeover is a Rs 66,550 cr bomb

The capital may wear the look of a bombed-out city but on paper, it has got a facelift worth Rs 66,550 crore for the Commonwealth Games - with the taxpayers picking up a major part of the tab.

Ace shooter Abhinav Bindra and CWG OC chief Suresh Kalmadi unveil Games uniforms
Delhi's beautification makes up for the bulk of the total expenses on the Games - Rs 70,608 crore. That is 114 times more than the estimated original price tag of the Games, and four times what the government spends on the National Rural Health Mission every year.

The startling figures, which appear in Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and The Commonwealth Games (HarperCollins India) by Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta, can only cause further embarrassment to the Sheila Dikshit government, which has been on a taxation spree on the pretext of the Games.

"Such an escalation is unheard of in the history of world sport," says Majumdar, a sports historian and an adjunct professor at the University of South Australia, Adelaide. "These figures aren't polemic, but empirically based on facts," he adds.

Full report here India Today

Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta marvellously invoke the line about the Commonwealth being “a body searching for a purpose”, and apply that to Delhi’s appropriation of the Games as a symbol of India’s new place in the world order. They trace the origins and contours of the Delhi Games inside a wider picture of the Games being part of a complex, even conflicted “Commonwealth” organisation.

Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and
the Commonwealth Games
Boria Majumdar, Nalin Mehta
HarperCollins; Rs 450

The book begins with the current state of Delhi’s organisation on the eve of the event. Majumdar and Mehta then trace the evolution of the Commonwealth Games inside the Commonwealth project itself, before tracing India’s place in the Commonwealth as driven by Nehru’s foreign policy. The book concludes with an assessment of India’s current sporting condition.

The opening sections on the Games will attract most interest because the costs alone are staggering. From official figures they suggest that the original cost estimate of approximately $1.3billion has mushroomed to $15billion. That will make the Games seven times more expensive than Melbourne in 2006 and demonstrably the most expensive Commonwealth in Games history.

That $15billion figure is instructive. It matches the Andhra Pradesh government’s 2015 target for IT exports; the Union Government’s revenue for the recent sale of its 3G mobile phone spectrum; and the current level of the national subsidy for agricultural fertiliser. Union and Delhi governments think the Games are important, then.

‘It’s a last minute patch up job to get the event going’

As Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta set out to unravel the layers of the Commonwealth Games 2010, they zeroed down on the title ‘Sellotape Legacy’ with “some degree of disappointment.” They were “absolutely convinced that from here on what India can best achieve at the Games will be a Sellotape Legacy— it’s a last minute patch up job to get the event going.” They reveal how “there should have been one person with the sole authority of taking decisions, as was in the 1982 Asiad. Rajiv Gandhi, for good or bad, could take calls as multiple decision makers are catastrophic for the Games.” Majumdar and Mehta get candid with Sukalp Sharma on their research, experience, revelations, and all that has gone into their latest offering—Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and the Commonwealth Games.

You mentioned how sporting events “are about cities and nations and their places in the world.” So, how would you rate the Commonwealth Games and Delhi?
As we have argued in the book the Games could surely have played a part in securing for India a place in the list of nations, which have played host to mega events. It is a well established strategy—use sport to position a nation in the world parliament of nations. China used Beijing to establish itself as the world’s premier sporting power, beating the US was, for example, the real aim and the real intent was world supremacy. Given the state of affairs prevalent in Delhi, India will need a miracle to achieve this goal.

Full interview here Financial Express