7 years and 6 months before the games: In May 2003 an overconfident BJP decided that time for India has arrived to join the big boys club and throw a big party for the occasion. BJP put up the bid for Delhi as the host of CWG 2010 with a lot of fanfare. The party that gave us the infamous 'India Shining' campaign vastly underestimated the costs required for the job as their costing was presumably based on the costs for the previous games in London and Sydney where the infrastructure already existed and only needed sprucing up for the event unlike in India where we had to build whole stadiums and facilities from scratch.
7 years before the games: In September 2003 according to our current sports minister Ajay Makan BJP signed host city agreement contract with CWF declaring that OC will be chaired by IOA chairperson Suresh Kalmadi, which meant according to Mr. Makan that we were stuck with incompetent and possibly corrupt person like Kalmadi and couldn't remove him even if we wanted to because government intervention is frowned upon once the organizing committee is set up and contract signed. Although govt. after all the complains started arriving could have still easily put somebody to oversee the work done and possibly convince CWF officials of Kalmadi's incompetence had the govt. been more proactive and aware.
6 years before the games: Elections were held in 2004 and the govt. that came to power this time was not overconfident BJP but socialist timid congress with a PM of more than 70 years old. Congress as we now know was going to take India from overconfident BJP to a crisis of confidence and gloom and doom where it looks like corruption and governance paralysis will kill the India growth story and forever keep us in poverty. Organizing a successful game needed a confident proactive govt.
4 years before the games: It is 2006 and virtually no progress has been made in the preparation. In fact, I remember a story on BBC in which visiting CWG officials complained that not even organizing committee was set up and no work had started. OC CWG was set up in 2005 February long after the games were awarded to India. To make matters worse PM made another disastrous move and appointed then 65 year old Mani Shankar Aiyar as minister of youth affairs and sports who hates big ticket sporting items as a waste of money and time. Just the other day he was on BBC arguing against hosting major sporting events and how they are a huge waste of money and time. I don't know how much his views had affected the CWG work and to his credit he did write a letter to PMO on October 23, 2007 about issues with OC, but it seems PM thought most of Mr. Aiyar's objections regarding games were ideological in nature.
3 years before the games: IAS officer and former Chief Operating Officer of the OC, Vijay Kumar Gautam stated that when I joined OC on September 7, 2007, the technology functional area was non- functional. The technical staff was yet to be appointed. There was no person handling technology functional area. Needless to say that no work related to technology was even contemplated till that time, though the OC CWG 2010 had come into being in February 2005. "In fact there was no hurry on the part of the top bosses in OC to get the things moving. There was deliberate negligence. It is stated the technology functional area is one of the core functional areas requiring highly skilled experts to handle the matters related to it," Gautam told the CBI.
Six months before the games: Reports had started arriving in the media about how a lot of work still needs to be done and the games are just six months away. Deadlines after deadlines came and went but some work was still pending.
One month before the games: A slew of bad news started coming. Delhi had particularly severe monsoon that year and news reports were saying Yamuna was flowing above the danger level threatening flooding and ruining the games. The severe monsoon had resulted in about 200 cases of Dengue in the city. A gunman had opened fire on a tourist bus wounding a few tourists. Amid this gloom OC had finally allowed a media tour of the facilities and it seemed as if we were all going to be proven wrong. The facilities were all really splendid with breathtaking post modern architecture . The stadiums were all beautiful. Media highlighted that 0ne or two stadiums like the swimming arena looked a bit hurried but still even that looked much beautiful than we all had hoped. The residential blocks for athletes were gorgeous with in-house practice pool and running track that looked good enough to stage the actual games, a first for any games. It seemed we were gonna surprise the world. International media so far had not talked about CWG in any news bulletins and CWG OC had done no PR campaigns to show how much work was done and how beautiful stadiums we had built like done by all OC's of all games. In fact, no footage was provided showing positive aspect like all the great facilities that were build even after bad news about the games started circulating in world media. I guess OC was just too busy with finishing deadlines to show to world what they had accomplished.
15 days before the games: As the athletes started arriving the true horrors of ill-preparedness of the OC started coming out. It turns out the residential flats we had seen a month ago were just few flats on the front and practice facilities along with food court but the other flats in the CWG village were far from prepared and ideal for event of such repute. Some of the flats were not even cleaned up and it seemed as if nobody had bothered to check up after the construction crew who were living there left without cleaning up. Dogs were roaming around in some flats and one of them had defecated in some areas. In some of the rooms AC's were not working which were not tested before. Clearly someone had not checked each flats in the village to see the preparedness.
Sad part is it was just probably a work of 10-15 days with competent workers and the whole village would have been brand new and clean. The actual facility and rooms were better than any games before it had it just been properly checked and cleaned up. It was by far the biggest mistake of the games and one that is unforgivable on the part of CWG OC, DDA, and Emmar MGF, which we still strangely haven't blamed and punished for not completing the construction on time and not ensuring that rooms are ready for possession and properly cleaned up.
Again govt. was slow to react. By the time govt. had brought in workers from five star hotels to clean up and repair all the AC's and lifts the news had reached every corner of the globe. For a whole week the front page news in every newspapers and TV news was how incompetent we are and how we could not even organize a simple games. All the bad news got exaggerated in the absence of any reassuring news from the govt. A part of a false roof thermocol tile fell down which was dubbed in the international media as the roof collapsed in weightlifting arena in CWG games in Delhi. It didn't help that a foot-over bridge joining the parking area with the main stadium collapsed. Our PR was horrible, which meant all the international media got the footage of collapsed bridge and pictures of dirty rooms in the CWG village flats. Had we kept the media out until everything was ready it would have made all the difference.
By the time opening ceremony was about to begin the international community and news media had already decided that this CWG games has been a huge disaster and it will be a miracle if we are able to pull it off successfully. It didn't help that our OC hadn't taken any international media persons on a tour of all the stadiums to show that they are indeed ready and are actually quite beautiful. In fact they hadn't even send pictures for the PR purpose despite getting so much negative press. You would think that they would at least highlight all the positive aspects after getting so much stick for some negative aspects. Only problem was in the village and stadiums were ready and world class but they failed to give that message to the world.
The actual games: The opening ceremony when it started it easily surpassed anybody wildest imagination and dare I say it was even better than 2008 Beijing Olympic opening ceremony as it was much more personal and much more Indian with our culture on proud display for the world to see. Here again unfortunately long speeches by Kalmadi and others meant that most of the world had switched off before the good parts of the ceremony. Anyway the rest as they say is history. The games went very well. The stadiums were all very nice and the actual games went quite well. Again OC should have realized before that for sports like lawn ball or netball audience participation will be low and should have run a campaign to get people in the stadium or at least bring in school kids for free but I guess they were too busy finishing the CWG village to think about such things. There were other typically Indian ticking issues as initially lot of tickets were given away or reserved for VIPs as it is always in India which meant in some cases stadiums were quite empty but tickets were sold out because they were reserved for VIPs. During the later part as our Indian athletes started winning medals people started coming and stadiums started getting full and it all went very well. But by this time we had long ago lost the PR battles and after highlighting all the problems beforehand anybody hardly covered the actual games and small problems kept the negative news flowing.
I think by far the biggest problem was that rooms in Games village were not ready on time and just because of simple laziness and mismanagement despite creating best facilities for any previous games and spending billions we only got bad publicity out of it and more importantly it made the general public feel depressed and less confident in our ability, exactly the opposite reaction to one which any games is supposed to elicit. So for that we have to punish DDA and Emmar MGF who were entrusted with the job of finishing the village flats on time with good quality, which they clearly failed to do. I am amazed that we have not punished them till now and only focused on Kalmadi and corruption in the games. The biggest mistake according to me was the village fiasco for which people ought to be punished.
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