There
have been dark clouds hovering over the Commonwealth
Games in Delhi for some time now, both literally and
figuratively. By the time this column appears, the Games
would officially have started. Any hopes of hosting
the ''most successful Games ever'' must surely have been
completely dashed even among the most enthusiastically
optimistic of self-deluding organisers. Surely the best
expectation - or hope - that anyone can now have of
these Games is that they go off peacefully, without
major mishap and with a minimum of additional national
embarrassment.
The
national media have been crying themselves hoarse for
some time now about the poor planning, confused approach,
wasteful spending and of course massive corruption that
have characterised the official preparations for the
Games. Media allegations have been increasingly supported
by all too depressing empirical evidence, in the form
of shoddy poor quality construction, deaths of workers
and others during the building work, collapses of buildings
and bridges. The disruption and disarray caused by the
preparations have been so extensive that for the past
few months it has been next to impossible to find a
single resident of the city of Delhi and its suburbs,
who has a good word for the Games. And this was well
before the most recent public humiliations experienced
by the organisers.
Given all this, it has been more than surprising to
note the rather dismissive and then lethargic responses
to these allegations and concerns at both state government
and national government levels. After all, this was
an event that presumably was bid for and taken on to
showcase the country and, thereby, the government, to
present an image of positive and energetic efficiency
at least in terms of organising an international event,
and then explicitly to provide ''a positive legacy''.
Even those who have been fiercely critical of such an
aim as well as of the policy of expending huge resources
on this rather limited objective somehow assumed that,
when push came to shove, the government would make sure
that the final outcome would deliver on this.
But almost characteristically, domestic criticisms and
warnings proved to have little effect in galvanising
the government into real action to rectify the unfortunate
situation in any meaningful way. It took international
criticism - not only from the CWG organisers, but also
from global media and from participating teams - to
force the last minute changes that finally occurred,
although of course it remains to be seen how effective
those changes actually were.
And then, of course, the indictment came from a quarter
that the government is especially sensitive about -
an international credit rating agency. Globally, credit
rating agencies, including the big two Moody's and Standard
and Poor, are themselves currently the subject of much
valid criticism. Their incompetence and even complicity
in the US financial crisis; the general tendency they
have revealed of being behind the curve for most economies
or sectors that they deal with, the large and clear
evidence of conflicts of interests; and the opacity
of their own formulations and methods of arriving at
ratings: all these have been rightly attacked. Indeed,
it could be argued that the external reputation and
''public rating'' of credit rating agencies has never
been so low.
Even so, governments - including the Indian government
- remain sensitive to what the credit rating agencies
say. And they get extremely concerned when such agencies,
no matter how discredited they may be otherwise, point
to anything that could damage investor perceptions about
the Indian economy.
So when Moody Analytics, a research unit of the global
rating agency Moody's, also joined in the general condemnation
and was widely quoted in the national and international
press, the concern in official circles that are otherwise
unconnected to the Games was palpable. Reports on the
comments quote this group as having argued as follows:
''Concerns regarding safety, security and site preparedness
are tarnishing the country's global image... India's
reputation as a tourist and investment destination could
be damaged... Confidence in India's infrastructure,
its capacity to organise large events, and its reputation
as a tourist destination have all been brought into
question... Fears regarding safety and security have
been upstaged by more immediate concerns about India's
preparedness to host the event, following the collapse
of a pedestrian bridge, allegations of widespread corruption
and revelations that the athletes' housing was unfinished
days before competitors are scheduled to arrive... The
decision by a number of individual athletes to pull
out... have dominated headlines at a time when India
should have been showcasing its rising economy, recent
infrastructure development, and improved business environment...
the fiasco is undermining the anticipated benefits of
hosting a major international sports event.''
The bottom line, according to this report, is that the
negative publicity that has already been generated by
this event could deter foreign investment and give multinational
businesses that are considering expansion in India a
reason to think twice. To a government whose sensitivity
to foreign investor perceptions is so strong, this kind
of criticism is devastating.
But in the midst of all the breast-beating that is going
on about the terrible mess that has been created so
far, perhaps there is need to stand back and consider
the matter with a less negative attitude. Certainly
there is national shame, embarrassment and also anger
at the entire way in which the Games were conceived,
planned and executed in Delhi. Certainly this has exposed
not only well-known weaknesses in our system, but even
weaknesses that were earlier not widely known to exist.
Certainly the international exposure of the nation as
being so incompetent could very easily have been avoided,
as the country does not lack competent managers who
could have easily handled what is ultimately not such
a difficult job over several years.
But maybe such exposure was necessary to remind us,
and particularly our policy makers and media, of how
flawed has been the hype surrounding resurgent India.
The fact that the Indian economy has shown high GDP
growth rates in the recent past and generated a significant
number of dollar billionaires has created not just a
false sense of overall prosperity as well as completely
unfounded complacency, as well as recklessly optimistic
predictions about India's future progress.
It has made us forget that not only are the bulk of
our population still very poor in income terms even
by the standards of most developing countries, but that
we have failed them in possibly more important ways:
inadequate and even reduced access to proper food and
nutrition; appalling lack of infrastructure in some
of the most basic senses (for example, around 40 per
cent of rural households still do not have access to
electricity connections); often terrible and mostly
privatised health services with one of the largest proportions
of out-of-pocket spending by households in the world;
completely insufficient educational facilities, with
large and even growing gaps between urban and rural
students, rich and poor students, boys and girls; a
predominance of informal employment in poor conditions,
with growing open unemployment for the most vulnerable
group of youth.
One problem with the recent growth trajectory has been
that the sheer size of India can allow the elite to
forget, often for fairly long periods, the broader failures
of the development project in India thus far. It can
allow not just the needs but also the aspirations of
the majority of people in the society to be ignored.
It can allow the privileged few not just to skim of
most of the benefits of the growth that does occur,
but to imagine that they are on the threshold of a new
India in which they do not have to keep worrying about
the material conditions of the great unwashed masses
because they are now globally relevant players.
Maybe this kind of rude shock was necessary to bring
people who had been dreaming along these lines back
to earth. Maybe the inability to host a relatively small
international event will bring home the lesson that
real economic success does not come so easily or cheaply.
Maybe it will force such people to realise that the
real development of a country must involve first and
foremost a focus on improving the material and socio-economic
conditions of most of the people. Maybe they will begin
to recognise that, without such a focus, attempts to
focus on glittering new infrastructure and the like
will quickly be exposed to be hollow, vacuous and even
pathetic.
So far, such a realisation has not fully dawned on those
who rule in Delhi. In the run-up to the Games, beggars
have been removed and placed in temporary makeshift
camps to keep them out of public view for foreigners
to frown upon. Streets with filthy and messy sections
have been provided with screens bearing the CWG logo
and mascot to hide the muck behind from visitors' eyes.
Street vendors and others have been displaced and summarily
deprived of their livelihood in order to provide a ''clean
and green'' image to the wider world.
Obviously, all such attempts are now laughable. And
that is probably a good thing. It is a hard lesson for
the government to learn, but learn it must: you cannot
get others to respect you if you do not respect yourself
- and all your citizens - first. If this actually gets
driven home to those in charge, this will indeed be
the silver lining in the current cloudy fiasco. It might
even make the whole sorry endeavour worth it after all.
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