CWG - Corruption Wealth Games

This is probably a good enough summary of why we dont care for this tournament.

That, finally, is the reason why none of us have any ownership of the Commonwealth Games. We don’t see them as a great national enterprise. We see them as a money-making activity run by a group of discredited sleazeballs. That’s why none of us is really surprised by the corruption allegations. When you put bank robbers in charge of the bank, how astonished can you be when they rob the bank blind?

If we, the Indian people, support these Games, it will be a big mistake. This is a golden chance for citizens to put this corrupt and insensitive government to shame. Usually corruption issues are local in nature and they never really get the national traction or resonance that these Games have offered. The CWG is an amazing opportunity because all Indians have been robbed at the same time. Add to that the fact that the government is desperate to save face. Now is when we can get them. And the way to do it is simply what the father of our nation pioneered in his time — noncooperation. Yes, and i’ve deliberated long before saying this — do not watch these Games. Do not go to the venues. Do not watch them on TV. You cannot become a cheerleader to an exercise in cheating. The Indian people have been exploited enough, but to expect us to smile through it is a bit much. If they can walk out of Parliament, we can walk out of stadiums.

For the full text of the column by Chetan Bhagat in the Sunday TOI, click here

I think I agree

In a country which is surely not among the most advanced in the world and where the index of corruption displays such demeaning figures that to keep our heads high at the angle that god meant them to be is itself a conscious effort as we walk the national streets of sleaze, each day of our lives!

For the full text of the article By Sunaad Raghuram in Churmuri, click here

The unprecedented level of public anger over the screw-ups in the preparations of the Commonwealth Games (CWG) can be best understood if we see it as a clash between two Indias. The people in charge of the Games typify old India: corrupt, slothful, incompetent, chaotic, unconcerned with the pursuit of excellence, unwilling to benchmark against global standards and convinced that in India, sab chalta hai. The people who are most angered and horrified by the CWG mess are those who believe that we are creating a new India: one that can do things to global standards, whose competence and intelligence are highly regarded all over the world, an India where people work hard, where there are high levels of accountability and where commitments are treated as sacred.

When Indians talk about ourselves these days, it is this new India we allude to. It is the new India that is an emerging superpower. It is the new India that is the rival of a resurgent China. It is the new India that the world is rushing to befriend and to invest in. But just as we begin to believe the hype about the new India, the old India comes back and bites us in the arse.

The tragedy of the Commonwealth Games is that it did not have to turn out like this. If we had assigned the Games preparations to the private sector — to any of the infrastructural companies that run airports, build hotels etc — budgets would have been adhered to, deadlines would have been kept and the construction wouldn’t have been sub-standard. Moreover, there would have been accountability. If the private sector fails, then it doesn’t get paid.

To access the full column by Mr Vir Sanghvi in the Hindustan Times, click here

Indeed, how true!
 

First to Naveen - If you consider me to be part of new India (young?), don't think many of us think that we are performing wonderfully well :)

Now, one more thing to note about the CWG fuss is that just because the commitments made were international, media scrutiny and big name critic's mind-share has been heavy. Reminds me of how people jumped after Bangalore Airport (BIAL) when it opened.

The day media will think about publishing pictures of ...

• paan stains, broken stairs, stinking toilets, bug ridden guest house beds, water-less coolers etc from New Delhi, Howrah or Bengaluru railway stations,
• or broken and missing pavements or bus shelters at K R Puram, Marathahalli interchanges (used by more people every day than number of athletes at CWG village, and visitors through BIAL)

... we would have started on making the change.

Perhaps its in our culture to focus more on show and tell (external appearance). That's why only shoddy work at CWG and non flashy work at International Airport gets attention. Rest of the country is for "these other people", not worth attention, and with different standards.

Now don't go there - "democracy" and superior march. Not worth discussing online :)

I don't see that much doom either though. The march has certainly been good recently, growth faster than before, faster than many and well sustained. Just need to get media and everyone to focus on "everyday things" and "everyone", and things could get even better.

Go to indicus.net. IF we could get this (http://indicus.net/Produc...), and more numbers, such discussions could be fun.

Any study of architecture or building science will evidently show that a nation's buildings are such that they are actually very truthful indicators of any people's culture, capacity, attitude among many other things, compared to any other nation (as a datum). This has been true to any civilization, any culture and any time period.

In fact, to me, how India has handled CWG was not surprising at all, on the contrary, it was very predictable.

Please assume I might just be qualified to say this- buildings and construction in India, sadly, has a very long way to go in terms of vision, ambitions, technology, the drive to create projects to be proud of, right system of education to create the talent to do so and the very important ones relevant to- attitude of integrity, creative curiosity. Leave alone trend-setting, we are not even among the trend-followers.

Right from creating the development brief (which can be manipulated so as to benefit specific parties), selecting third parties for the project- including architects, contractors, suppliers, consulting engineers, to the other stages of approving quality/quantity of work during various stages of construction, to verifying the bills for quantities, conformity to use of specified materials (which is itself manipulated), everything, everything can be so easily manipulated.

Just a thought- Don’t mean to come across as a doomsday soothsayer, but that crumbling bridge or the crappy washbasin is just an indicator of what we are going towards- a resultant of all the sums of our positives and negatives.

Also, the hard truth (which might make us take up serious objection to this) is that CWG’s crumbling bridges and living quarters with crap in the living rooms is nothing but a truthful window into what our nation is as of now (whether we want to feel like we are a part of this mess or not is a different discussion).

Ultimately, we need to remember all these people are there, ruling us, because we put them there. Doesn’t matter if we chose to elect them or we chose to not give up our lives to avoid these people ruling us. These people being there is our choosing. Maybe we should at the least, stop fooling ourselves and realize that we never expected anything more from ourselves than what we have done at CWG.

India desperately needs martyrs, probably another Gandhi. I do not know if Gandhi is going to be enough.

One event on what some government bodies are doing: There was this private builder who, one morning, when going to his office noticed some children studying under a tree instead of being inside the school building, which was very dilapidated (the whole building later fell when the JCB touched the corner of the property) . He built a new school for them and refused to put up his company's name on the newly built school. Later he was forced to put it up because- get this- the government employees from both the public works department and the education department (or two similar government bodies) started creating bills and paperwork for that building so they can consume that much money from the government coffers. The point is that the people in the government concerning or managing building projects are busy doing such stuff.

Interesting read from Burkha Dutt in Hindustan Times.

"...But when it came right down to the crunch — at that moment when we panicked as a country — we looked towards the State and its agencies to bail us out from a potential private sector debacle. When the Games Village was dubbed “filthy and unliveable”, despite being contracted to the spiffy real estate giant Emaar-Mgf, it took Sheila Dikshit to tuck her sari into her petticoat and get the floors scrubbed as a matriarch would her own house..."

"...When the foot overbridge, built at a cost of R5 crore by PNR-Infra came crashing down, the Army put Humpty-Dumpty together again in less than five days. When the swashbuckling arrogance of the Games  Organising Committee became directly proportional to that sinking feeling in our hearts, we waited to hear from the PM. In some sort of bizarre, return-to-the-womb impulse, it was almost as if we didn’t feel entirely safe in the hands of the private czars; looking instead for assurance in the embrace of the Sarkar. This does not mean that we are romanticising the years of public sector inefficiency either. But, with the Games scandal coming close on the heels of the Indian Premier League corruption, we realise that when you throw gigantic amounts of money at an event and don’t regulate it by benchmarks of responsible  governance, what you get is crony capitalism, not liberalisation..."

For more read here

The last sentence summarizes the essence of CWG and lessons that we need to learn.