How else will you justify the spending of roughly ‘Seventy Thousand Crores’ on the Common Wealth Games (CWG) to be held from the 3rd Oct’2010 in the national capital?
An expenditure that far exceeds all measures of our economic demographics be it the countries GDP, Trade stats, the avg per person income, the literacy levels, the sanitation, law and order requirements etc etc.
There were seventy thousand concerns detrimental to a nations effective functioning that have been screaming attention to be attended to, Concerns that have for decades been delayed or ignored for the lack of funds while the CWG has been considered apt for spending such a mammoth sum.
It is a display of shameful hypocrisy and ignorant short sightedness by those who harp on the advantages of hosting the world sports event of such magnitude when our entire system and culture has failed to inculcate a sports psyche in the country.
- How many schools and colleges lay emphasis on there being a playground on their campus? Schools these days don’t even have space to park their buses!
- In how many institutes is a sporting area respected and not cramped with a storage space?
- How many families or mindsets encourage the young ones to take sports as seriously as their ‘studies’? and lastly,
- How many of us consider a sporting activity- irrespective of our age and profession- to be a mandatory commitment in our routine, if not daily than weekly?!
Our culture primarily and consistently has been to complete our studies, procure a decent job and then marry respectably, where in this does sports feature?
There is of course enough justification for this. It is not possible to sustain your self as a sportsman in India. In the pre- Sachin Tendulkar days even cricket was dismal and appalling like its foster siblings. 
Understandably the country had been bruised on its way to be free and while taking its baby steps towards governance always had other priorities that needed funding and they were far more important than sports. The unfortunate fact is even after having given those priorities the deemed attention- for more than half a century- they continue seem substandard and patchy and suddenly we seem to have shifted focus to hosting world events like the CWG, cricket world cup and now even the F1 races!
How did this change happen? How did we suddenly have enough funds of such high proportions to be directed at avenues that were initially not on our priority list and still should not be?
The large portion of our populace is still poor, there are still no comfortable public sanitation facilities even in the metros, the transport system and community planning still needs ample funds and attention, there are grave terrorist threats that need expensive security measures; oh wait!!! Let me speak in the language that the CWG organizers understand, thus- There are still stadiums to be built and gymnasiums that not only need to be built but a thousand rotting facilities that need better maintenance, staff and equipment, there are still lakhs of sportsman who have still not received their promised rewards, a call center job still is more lucrative than that of a sportsman, there are still salary hikes due for lakhs of athletes who live in demanding and unhygienic conditions....
The common wealth exercise and the likes thus simply seems to be a criminally lethal economic enterprises for the entrepreneurs, by the entrepreneurs and of the entrepreneurs who shall be ‘commonly’ getting ‘wealthy’ at the end of the ‘games!’ and the divide between a superfluous urban India and the earthy rural India only widens... Scary!
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