Perhaps it was with the scandals preceding the 201 °Commonwealth Games that middle-class hopes of their society’s future became dashed. For many people, these scandals, which blew the lid on a set of mechanisms usually hidden from view, explained much about why their landscape took the particular form that it did. With some sixty countries attending, the Games had been anticipated as a moment of international visibility and prestige. The affluent classes were in general sympathetic to the avowed ambitions of Delhi’s political managers, who saw the Games as an opportunity to secure extraordinary budgets and powers for a profound transformation of the city: building much-needed new transport infrastructure, restoring and cleaning up the city, evicting the poor from informal settlements on what was now much-prized land. For many of the poor, it was a catastrophe, but it seemed to the middle classes that if the gains came at a price, the best people to pay it were the ones who were miserable anyway.
But as 2010 approached it became clear that many of these supposed benefits would never materialise. Even the mainstream press, usually so enamoured of power and money, hurled daily abuse and accusations at the power nexus that had thrown itself into the scramble for the Games budget. This budget was large and, as it proved, highly elastic since, having agreed to host a mega-event, administrators could hardly refuse to pay if key contractors suddenly inflated their prices a few months before the opening ceremony. It was estimated that preparations for the Games, including the attendant development projects, ultimately set public finances back by 70,000 crore rupees [$14 billion]57 — forty times the original budget — and it was obvious that much of the increase could be blamed on an immense racket of bureaucrats and their friends in construction and trade, who over-charged (toilet paper was supplied to the organisers, famously, at $80 a roll) and under-delivered. The sturdy, well-equipped city that the middle classes had dreamed of never arrived: instead there arrived a kind of temporary plaster facsimile of such a thing which, in the end, bore no resemblance to the computer-generated images with which the whole decade-long endeavour had been sold.
“When the Athens Olympics were going on,” said a foreign official involved with the Games, “there was a lot of corruption, but the objective stayed fixed. Everyone was intent on producing the games to the requisite standards. In Delhi, the administrators were entirely willing to compromise the Games themselves. The objective was not the Games at all, in fact.
“Look at what happened with the catering contract. The tender was put out and won by an American company, which was just about the only company in the world that had the expertise to camp in Delhi and produce 8,000 meals a day to the quality necessary for athletes. But they refused to pay 10 per cent to the chairman of the organising committee.
“He sat on it for a while. When they still didn’t pay up he threatened to re-open the tender. His advisers said this would be fatal because months would be lost and the entire Games could be threatened. Without a caterer there are no Games. They also warned that it would inevitably go to the same company, who would then charge a higher price. But he went ahead and issued the tender again, citing some technicality against the American firm.
“Seven months were lost. Eventually, the contract went back to the same company. What’s more, the British company that was going to rent the kitchen equipment now retracted their rental offer and said that everything would have to be bought. Not only that, but there was no longer enough time to ship the equipment over so they had to fly it in. They tried a 747 but it was too small, so they had to rent an Antonov, the largest carrier aircraft in the world, to bring it in. You can imagine what kind of cost escalation all that entailed.
“There were four main ways that people made money out of Commonwealth Games contracts. The first involved awarding them to oneself or to one’s family members. Even if this happened they would not then stop at the legitimate profits that could be earned on these contracts. They would massively inflate the prices and supply only a cardboard cut-out version of what they were supposed to supply — which is why so many roads and buildings were collapsing just before the Games.
“The venues are built to such a pathetic standard that it’s all just trash. Usually when you do these events, there are immediate benefits — like tourism and international prestige — and then there are long-term benefits, which consist mainly of the physical legacy. From the Delhi Games there will be no long-term benefits, because the quality of the buildings has been massively compromised. The steel they provided for the frames, for instance, was of very low quality because of money extraction. So the buildings began to buckle. Enormous money then needed to be spent hiring foreign engineering consultants to re-inforce the buildings.
“The second way to make money was to take a percentage of everything in a certain turf. That’s why organising committee meetings always felt like an assembly of gangsters, because they were dominated by turf wars. Many stoppages in the process, which appeared incomprehensible to outsiders, were about conflicts over turf. For instance, one person took 10 per cent of all hotel bookings. That person managed to ensure that the accommodation that was supposed to be built for visiting officials was never approved, so that they had to stay in hotels throughout. The entire form of the Games, in fact, was determined by the structure of internal money-making.
“The third way was to accept bribes for awarding contracts. Administrators made a lot of money in this way, which businessmen obviously had to make back either by inflating the cost of what they supplied, or by supplying sub-standard goods.
“And the fourth way to profit from the Games was simply to steal all this equipment which had been bought at such inflated cost. Much of it disappeared afterwards. Some was taken by the Delhi police, who used furniture and computers for their offices. In other cases the police may have been paid by someone else to take it. Flat screen TVs disappeared, world-class gym equipment. This was helped by the fact there was no inventory of anything. So no one could prove afterwards that something was missing. The entire Commonwealth Games was run on individual computers and private email addresses: there was no central server. This was not just incompetence: it was a deliberate strategy to ensure there was no systematic information. Another thing that was stolen was hard drives. People turned up in the morning to find their entire data gone. I believe this was a deliberate attempt to erase the data trail. The budget of the organising committee simply disappeared, for instance, and this could happen because the management systems were deliberately inadequate. Decision-making was completely fudged and money disappeared through the gaps.”