Commentary
by Nupur Basu

In the post-mortem that will follow in the coming weeks and months regarding what went wrong in the preparedness for the Commonwealth Games (CWG) 2010, one area where more skeletons are likely to tumble out will be the plight of thousands of poor labourers who worked on the project sites.
The human stories of suffering and exploitation of children, women and men who were contracted to work on below minimum wages on the multimillion dollar project and the number of poor families that lost their sole breadwinner in accidents.
Other than the stained bathrooms and dog-cat-pawed bedsheets at the athletes village beamed by foreign television crews that has made India a laughing stock in the world overnight and exposed its politicians and bureaucrats for their rank greed and total incompetence, one constituency utterly exploited by these same people has been the condition of labour employed under extremely exploitative and unsafe terms on project sites.
Adding insult to injury, both Chief Minister Sheila Dixit and Urban Development Minister S. Jaipal Reddy described the accidents like the foot overbridge collapse and a portion the false ceiling coming unstuck at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium as a ‘small glitch’ and a minor problem. You wonder how elected representatives of one of the world’s biggest democracies can dismiss the accident that injured 27 poor workers and pushed four of them to a critical state in hospital as ‘minor hitches and glitches’.
The exploitative use of labour during the entire Games is at the root of many things that have gone wrong. Media reports that the reason for the filth- and excreta-filled Games Village was there were virtually one or two workers allotted per tower for cleaning - there are 34 towers. This in itself was a recipe for disaster. If venues are not fit for human habitation or ceilings and footbridges are collapsing hours before the Games are to begin, the role of the contractors who have cut corners on safety and labour wages and the role of the OC as the overall project manager can amount to criminal negligence.
The shocking exploitation of poor people without any voice may be the biggest moral scam of the now infamous Commonwealth Games 2010 in India.
Nupur Basu is a journalist, filmmaker and rights activist.