Can India Host the 2010 Olympics?

It is incredible that the Indian Olympics Association should even dream of hosting the 2020 games after the royal snub it got a few days ago. The Jamaican president of the Commonwealth Games Federation, Michael Fennell, wrote a strong letter to the Association seeking a “crisis talks” with the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, on the lack of preparedness for the New Delhi games scheduled for October 2010. Someone leaked to the media a copy of the letter Fennell wrote expressing his anxiety at the lack of preparations. He wanted Singh to intervene and try and formulate a recovery plan.

This is six years after India won the bid to host the Commonwealth games and with just about 12 months to go!

But this predicament — or goof-up — did not deter the Association president, Suresh Kalmadi, from brazenly telling the media the other day that the country would try and clinch the 2020 games.''I would like to inform you all that New Delhi will bid for the 2020 Olympic Games,'' he said during the inauguration of 'Olympic Bhawan' in the capital. He added that the country would have excellent infrastructure by then, thanks to the 2010 games. Will it?

For, serious apprehensions are being raised about India’s ability to host the October 2010 games, where 71 countries would take part with their 8,000 athletes. Though the Chief Minister of the host city, Delhi, Sheila Dixit, and Kalmadi have gone to town bragging about how well equipped and prepared India is to flag off the mammoth event, the nation of a million-plus people is hardly ready with just a year to go. And so much of this disarray is visible. The 19 main sports venues are still in the skeletal stage, and another leaked report, this time from the government’s main auditor, in July said work on 13 of them was way behind schedule: the swimming, hockey, boxing and rugby sites were barely 50 percent complete.

Given this, it is feared that the swimming events cannot take place at all. Even the main site, Jawaharlal Nehru stadium, built for the Asian games in 1982 and now being remodelled, is still in a state of pathetic incompletion. The roof is yet to appear, and it is meant to shelter 60,000 spectators.

Fennell is equally if not more worried about other issues. Nothing has been planned or done about transport, medical care and catering. And what about ticketing.

The question is, what is the problem. Apparently, it has got nothing to do with budget, which is a whopping USD 335 million. This figure implies that the coming games will be one of the best funded anywhere in the world. So the answer would point to one important factor: inefficiency. Often, the Indian administration is horribly red-tapped and bureaucratic, and the Indian Olympic Association exhibits all the flaws of the country’s incompetent public sector. Take the example of the State-run Air India that is burdened with huge losses, and the losses continue to mount with some 700-800 employees attached to a single plane! What a waste of manpower and resources.

The Association may not be overstaffed at 300, but is packed with a group of officers, who are slothful and bureaucratic. They are no specialists and are there merely at the whims and fancies of someone with political power and influence. They do not understand their tasks. In fact, they have very little knowledge of what they have been assigned to do. So, they do not take decisions at all or are reluctant to do so. What is even more ridiculous is the fact that there are 23 committees to look into the various aspects, but the heads of these seldom meet. The vice-president of the Indian Olympics Committee, Randhir Singh, seems to have accepted this terrible scenario. He averred that “We now have to retrieve the games.” He has called for emergency measures.