Corporate India frets over Games damage to ‘Brand India’

A leading Indian business lobby group has said it is deeply worried about the possibility of the country’s humiliation over the looming Commonwealth Games whose fate now hangs in doubt.

The New Delhi Games, billed as a global showcase for India’s rise as a major economic power, are a shambles 10 days before the start, with athletes’ pulling out amid security fears and unfinished infrastructure.

“I must confess we are deeply concerned,” Amit Mitra, general secretary of the Federation of India Chambers of Commerce and Industry, told Indian media.

“It is a sad state of affairs indeed and, psychologically, puts a question mark against India’s capacity to deliver,” he said.

In the last few days, events have gone from bad to worse with the Games’ international governing body and participating countries lambasting the athletes’ village as “filthy” and “unfit for human habitation”. Also a pedestrian footbridge under construction on the approach to the centrepiece Jawaharlal Nehru stadium collapsed, injuring 27 people, while a portion of a false ceiling at a weightlifting sports venue fell on Wednesday.

The footbridge collapse has raised questions about the safety of other structures built for the Games whose original cost was pegged by the government at less than $100 million in 2003 but later estimates have put at $3 billion or more.

“These incidents are definitely going to print a bad image for the country,” the managing director of steel maker Jindal Stainless, Ratan Jindal, told the Economic Times.

“We all know we are not so well-planned and work is done at the last moment in our country,” Mr Jindal said. New Delhi has had seven years to prepare for the Games though little work was done until 2008.

Many of India’s major development projects run over time and over budget.

Commonwealth Games Organising Committee treasurer A.K. Mattoo called the woes embroiling the Games a “collective failure”.

“Whatever has happened, we would like to apologise,” he said.