Major clean-up in Delhi to avert games disaster

EMBATTLED INDIAN officials struggled yesterday to salvage New Delhi’s Commonwealth Games as large numbers of participants delayed…

EMBATTLED INDIAN officials struggled yesterday to salvage New Delhi’s Commonwealth Games as large numbers of participants delayed their arrival to allow the organisers one last chance to finish preparations ahead of the event’s October 3rd opening.

Prime minister Manmohan Singh summoned senior ministers associated with the games to a crisis meeting late last evening, while Delhi’s chief minister Sheila Dikshit oversaw the deployment of hundreds of workers to clean the athletes’ village of debris, excrement and waste.

Staff from many five-star hotels in the city were last night helping with the clean-up effort at the village, which is to house up to 8,000 athletes and delegates from 71 former British colonies.

“There has been progress but there is more to do,” said Mike Hooper, chief executive of the games federation, trying to allay fears that the event will be cancelled.

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Several world-class athletes from Australia, Britain and Jamaica had withdrawn from the fortnight-long event citing concerns over health, hygiene and security. New Zealand yesterday joined Canada and Scotland in postponing their teams’ departure because of the poor conditions. England and Wales also expressed concerns.

The organising committee’s “indifference at times has seemed to border on the intransigent to us, and that’s just unacceptable”, said Andrew Pipe, head of Canada’s games delegation.

Meanwhile, pictures of the athletes’ village leaked to the BBC yesterday – the area is out of bounds to the media – confirmed Mr Hooper’s assessment of it as “filthy” and “uninhabitable”.

The pictures showed dirty and leaking toilets, stained showers, and a bed covered in muddy dog-paw prints. Scores of stray dogs had infiltrated the athletes’ quarters through broken windows.

Other photos showed bathroom sinks full of dust and stained with an unidentifiable reddish-brown liquid; cracked and waterlogged pavements; shattered windows; stray wiring and rubble.

The organisers have struggled with security and health concerns, exacerbated by unusually fierce monsoon rains and flooding, which in turn spawned mosquitoes that spread dengue fever and malaria.

A vital footbridge leading to the main stadium collapsed earlier this week, and security fears escalated after two Taiwanese nationals were injured in a shooting outside Delhi’s well-known Friday Mosque. A Muslim militant group claimed responsibility for the shooting.

Adding to security fears, a top US counter-terrorism official warned that the games presented an “appealing target” for the Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-i-Toiba, due to their political and economic significance.

Michael Leiter, director of the US National Counter-terrorism Centre, told a Senate committee in Washington on Wednesday that the threat from the group had increased because of the heightened media exposure surrounding the event. India has a security plan in place involving more than 100,000 police, paramilitary and special commandos, including snipers. Helicopters and drones are also to be deployed for surveillance and real-time intelligence, officials said.

Intended as a showcase of India as a cosmopolitan emerging economic powerhouse, the games have instead become a national embarrassment, beset by allegations of corruption and questionable construction standards.

A poll in the widely circulated Hindustan Timesyesterday revealed that 68 per cent of Delhi residents surveyed were "ashamed" of the debacle, because it signified all that was wrong and inefficient in India and its administration.

“It is a sad state of affairs indeed and, psychologically, puts a question mark against India’s capacity to deliver,” Amit Mitra, general secretary of the Federation of India Chambers of Commerce and Industry said. “We are deeply concerned.”