Michael Batson

The Commonwealth Games are here. Terrorism, racism, burning effigies, exploitation, poverty, masses of security and, oh yeah, then there’s the sport.

The XIX Commonwealth Games are about to get underway in the Indian capital, New Delhi, but not without more than it’s share of problems associated with hosting multinational sporting events.  The preparations for the games has received criticism in the news media in India and abroad due to issues including bad weather, infrastructural problems (including the collapse of one new bridge), preparation delays, the withdrawal of prominent athletes, and allegations of widespread corruption.

 

Much has been made in the media of the lack of readiness of the athletes’ quarters and the fact that anyone staying in the village risks dengue fever due to hosting the games in the monsoon season. One would have to ask hadn’t they thought of that when the timing of the games was set down eight years ago?

 

Long time India observer and author, William Dalrymple, reports that flooding is so bad the “rivers have turned into lakes and the lakes have turned in seas” bringing with them clouds of mosquitoes to plague the visitors.

 

New Zealand’s chef-de-mission, Dave Currie, formed part of the Kiwi vanguard inspecting the venues a fortnight before the games were due to commence. The accommodation wasn’t ready he reported. Rooms that were finished weren’t clean, the toilets were filthy and not up to “Western” standards. These and other comments antagonised all manner of cultural sensitivities. Someone found a snake in one of the bedrooms. It was possible the games may have to be called off, or at least, held at other venues. By the way, how do you get a job as a chef de mission?

 

Given the Indians have had over seven years to put things together, why did people only discover a matter of days before the events were due to start, this lack of readiness? FIFA had inspection parties in and out of South Africa in the years and months leading up to the World Cup held this year reporting on the progress of stadium construction. The International Olympic Committee likewise sends officials on inspection tours of sites for both the summer and winter Olympics.

 

The Commonwealth Games are largely a second-tier event on the world’s sporting calendar. Once upon a time they were called the British Empire Games, a naked display of white might encased with all the colonial trappings.

 

Curiously, there are currently 54 members of the Commonwealth of Nations, but 71 teams participate at the games.

 

In terms of world class quality, the games barely rate a mention, and are saved from mediocrity only by the participation of some of the world’s greatest runners, the middle distance athletes from East Africa, namely the Kenyans and the sprinters of the Caribbean.

 

Per head of population, the Bahamas must rate as one of the greatest sprinting nations on Earth, able to muster from its tiny population of barely 350,000 relay teams which can foot it with the United States.

 

Some events would hardly satisfy being termed a sport – lawn bowls?

 

With the lucrative athletic events hosted elsewhere, some of those top athletes won’t even be there, preferring instead to rest injuries or prepare for the international track and field calendar. So unfortunately, there won’t be Usain Bolt at the games. At past games, the top sprinters would often wait and see who else was going to attend before making the decision to compete.

 

Trinidad and Tobago’s Ato Boldon, the four-time Olympic medal winner, only went to the 1998 games when several of the top Jamaicans decided to go. Otherwise he’d have stayed at home in Los Angeles, where he lived and where he trained with some of the top US sprinters.

 

The New Zealand sports minister has come out and said that some of the blame for the lack or readiness lies with Games Federation chief executive Michael Hooper, a fellow Kiwi. Hooper hasn’t helped matters when it was widely reported in India that he had said Delhi's “population hazard” hampered the organisation of the Games, remarks that have been interpreted by some Indians as racist. So incensed were some locals that protesters from the hardline Hindu group Rashtrawadi Sena burned an effigy of Hooper in front of the federation's offices in the Indian capital. The scarecrow type figure featured clothing stuffed with straw and a photo of Hooper's head placed on top of it. It was beaten and then set alight.

 

To make matters worse, Hooper has also made headlines this week for his allegedly plush lifestyle, paid for by Indian taxpayers via the games organising committee.

 

Reports say he has been given income tax breaks worth US$450,000, a rental property worth more than US$26,000 a month, a chauffeured limousine and a six-person staff at his property. This in a country that despite its burgeoning middle class, some 800 million still live below the universal poverty line of less than US$2 a day. The hosting of the games has also been criticised for the way thousands of slum dwellers and street traders were cleared out to make way for games’ venues and so as not to present an eyesore for the athletes and other visitors.

 

The cost of hosting the games is huge. One of the few independent estimates of what the 2010 Commonwealth Games have cost India, including all related infrastructure, has been made by two Indian journalists, Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta. Their tally comes to around US$16.5 billion - more than 110 times the first cost estimate prepared by organisers in 2002.

 

This is only the second time that the games have been hosted outside the Commonwealth’s Anglophile nations in a developing country, the other time was when the 1998 games were held in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. The hosting of such events is seen by these nations as a sort of coming of age, demonstrating that they can foot it with the more developed countries.

 

The event was meant to exhibit a bold new India ready to take on the world. Instead, old India - characterised by corruption and inefficiency - intruded to ruin the proceedings. Old India refers to the centrist system of politics and economic management in which the nation's neetas (politicians) and babus (bureaucrats) have ultimate authority and often use it to line their own pockets. The intricate bureaucratic system, embeded since independence in 1947, provides numerous opportunities for graft.

 

The reasons for the lack of timely preparation in the build-up to the start of the games lie here. Responsibility for the games, including building and refurbishing venues, was given mostly to a clutch of overlapping government bodies at national, state and municipal levels. This was a huge mistake according to Dalrymple, the British author and historian who has written extensively on India.

 

At least 21 different agencies had a stake in the Delhi Games, including some less than relevant government departments such as the Archaeological Survey of India. The jungle of government agencies hampered co-ordination and slowed progress.

 

A recent report on Delhi's games preparations by the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India found "many agencies were either unaware of their role or refuted the role expected of them". Some even had different timelines for the same project.

 

It has been suggested that the consequences of bypassing India's globally competitive private firms and leaving the games to India's public sector would put Monty Python to shame.

 

In July a corruption watchdog revealed it had found evidence of shoddy building work and inflated pricing for construction work. Fears about the quality of venues intensified after a footbridge near the main stadium collapsed last week injuring 27 workers. There have been a series of damaging corruption allegations including reports of a toilet roll billed at 4000 rupees or about US$90.

 

Together with corruption and k of financial transparency comes nepotism. An investigation published by The Indian Express newspaper last week revealed that at least 38 relatives of senior officials in Delhi's organising committee have jobs with the organisation. However, when questioned on this issue an organising committee spokesperson put this down to “coincidence.”

 

One positive to come out of the games’ fiasco however,  is India’s free press, which has exposed the games problems and demanded better accountability.

Security at the games is so tight and the levels of perceived risk so high, athletes will be prevented from leaving their secure environs to explore Delhi.

 

Thousands of troops, police and heavily armed paramilitary forces have been drafted in to provide security. Movement in and out of the games village is tightly controlled and requisite on presentation of an accredited pass. 

 

Officials in Australia have warned its athletes not to wear items that identify them as Australian, least the draw violent response from extremist groups seeking to target people from those countries allied with the US in its war in Afghanistan.

 

India has other security concerns. More than 100 protesters in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley have died in the past three months, most of them young stone throwers shot by Indian police. Meanwhile, a bloody Maoist insurgency in the east of the country festers and a court verdict on who owns land where Hindu mobs destroyed a historic mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 threatens to stoke communal tensions.

 

The Commonwealth Games have highlighted another issue of global concern, and one not peculiar to these games.  A recent analysis conducted by Britain’s Independent broadsheet of labour inspections by Nike, Puma and Adidas, the world's top brands, identified 281 rogue factories, whose failings ranged from the unsatisfactory to the abysmal.

 

Low pay and long hours are common in workshops but some also use bonded or prison labour, ban collective bargaining, threaten and harass workers and force women to undergo pregnancy testing. "Less productive" workers face the sack.

 

The world’s leading brands in the US$211 billion-a-year global sportswear industry seek to protect their reputations against allegations they profit from sweated labour by inspecting factories and blacklisting the worst. However, their own reports show they have had only partial success in cleaning up the industry, and that they continue to outsource production to countries where trade unions are banned or restricted.

 

Instead of the "living wage" sought by campaigners, they pay the legal minimum wage, which can be half the amount deemed necessary by unions and academics to meet the cost of food, shelter, healthcare and education for a small family. When challenged by paper, none of the firms denied that some of their supplier factories were "sweatshops".

 

According to the Independent, Nike's corporate responsibility report for 2007/09 paints the most vivid picture of conditions for the million of mostly Asian workers stitching and glueing sports shoes and apparel. It shows occasional or routine abuse by 35 per cent of Nike's suppliers – affecting up to 280,000 workers.

 

Of 479 factories checked last year, on average 168 failed to meet Nike's standards, meaning they had “serious system failures” or a “general disregard” for codes of conduct. One in five failed to provide contracts, honour collective bargaining, occasionally used children or worked staff seven days a week without a break. One in 20 flouted wage laws, used bonded, indentured, prison or child labour, abused staff, or carried out mandatory pregnancy tests.

 

Conditions may even be worse than publicly stated because factories falsify wage and time records to pass audits. Puma acknowledged “many factories” covered up excessive working hours with two sets of time records – one genuine and one for inspections. Apparently it is common knowledge in the industry that software programs have been developed specifically for this purpose, with workers being coached on how to answer questions.

 

Let the games begin…