Let me explain the model of governance formulated to deliver the games. The organizing committee, the apex body, had 484 members (though this number was later reduced to 454), with Kalmadi heading it. Twenty-three sub-committees were carved out of the organizing committee to extend advice in functional areas. There was another eighteen-member executive board of the organizing committee. This had only two government nominees, and Kalmadi chaired it. The day-to-day financial and administrative decisions were taken by yet another body, the executive management committee, chaired by Kalmadi, which had as members Randhir Singh, Lalit Bhanot (secretary general) and A.K. Mattoo (treasurer).
The organizing committee thus became a parallel non-governmental entity with no accountability to the government or concomitant controls to ensure propriety and transparency, despite full funding from the government. This, in fact, proved to be its undoing, as subsequent events revealed.
It is strange that we did not refer to the institutional structures which had successfully delivered the Asian Games in 1982. The 1982 Asian Games had a special organizing committee, with a cabinet minister level person heading it (Buta Singh). This was not only the nodal coordinating body but also had overriding powers over other agencies to ensure a holistic approach. None of the glitches CWG 2010 went through seem to have affected the 1982 Asian Games.
The other case in point is the conduct of the Melbourne CWG 2006. A large Indian contingent – comprising, among others, officials of the central and state (Delhi) government and the IOA secretary – visited Melbourne to make an on-the-spot study of their governance structure. The regional government of Victoria was made responsible for the overall supervision and conduct of CWG 2006 through a specifically formed cabinet sub-committee, drawn from key departments, and chaired by the prime minister. There was a specially appointed minister for the CWG (Justin Madden), and he was responsible for administering the Commonwealth Games Arrangements Act 2001. Under the Act, he had wide-ranging powers for the planning and the delivery of the games infrastructure which included venues, project orders and crowd management. This clearly established the fact that the games were the sole responsibility of the government and a clear hierarchical and unitary structure was created for its management. It is rather surprising that the huge Indian contingent of 139 people who went to study this did not come back and report these facts to their parent departments.
Most importantly, it was only to help the government in this regard that we took the initiative for the study report in July 2009. The purpose of the study was to give specific recommendations – considering the complexity and multiplicity of activities and the different claims and counter-claims of the participating departments, there was a need to rethink the entire governance model for the timely delivery of the games. There was no attempt to criticize or find fault. The objective was to help the government in its endeavour to stage a world-class CWG which would do India and Indians all over the globe proud.
On the first page of the report, it has been specifically mentioned:
We hope that the report, which has been prepared by us as independent auditors with an arm’s-length approach from the implementing agencies, will serve as a checklist and a ready reckoner to benchmark further progress toward preparing the infrastructure and in staging the games [...] Much time has been lost and it is imperative to move forward with the new found sense of urgency tempered by the realization that crashing of timelines and bunching of decisions carry with it the heightened risk of compromising transparency, accountability and structural safety of the venues.
Despite such warnings, with twelve days to go for the games, a suspension pedestrian overbridge near Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, the main venue, collapsed.
An intriguing event in the CWG saga was the appointment of a high level committee on 15 October 2010 (the games ended on 14 October 2010) to examine irregularities, if any, that had been committed by any agency. This came on the back of an atmosphere rife with allegations of wrongdoing. Every activity invited adverse notice. The electronic media made a certain toilet in the Games Village – and the organizing committee’s Lalit Bhanot’s statement that the standards of hygiene in India are different – famous across the globe, to drive home the country’s unpreparedness. Possibly to downplay such allegations and to quell the groundswell on the very morrow of the closing ceremony of the games, the constitution of a high level committee, with its chairman having the status of Supreme Court judge, was announced by the government, to examine the ‘weaknesses in management, alleged misappropriation, irregularities, wasteful expenditure and wrongdoing in the conduct of the games’ and recommend action.
The chair of the committee was a former CAG, V.K. Shunglu. This is rather strange because, on the one hand, the government was crying hoarse about the excesses of the three Cs – the CAG, the CVC and the CBI – and, on the other hand, it was getting a probe done obviously in addition to what the CAG would do – thus scoring a self-goal. I distinctly remember ringing up the cabinet secretary, K.M. Chandrasekhar, to ascertain if what the papers were saying was indeed true. Chandrasekhar, at home due to a foot ailment, evinced no information. The argument that the committee would deliver its findings earlier than the CAG audit also didn’t hold water, as the CAG audits had telescoped the timespan and were appearing rather fast. Any further collapsing of time would not be fair to the audited entities as they would not get a fair opportunity to respond to the queries against them. In fact, we did submit our report, all of its 743 pages, by about February 2011.
Excerpted with permission from Not Just An Accountant by Vinod Rai, Rupa Publications India.
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The organizing committee thus became a parallel non-governmental entity with no accountability to the government or concomitant controls to ensure propriety and transparency, despite full funding from the government. This, in fact, proved to be its undoing, as subsequent events revealed.
It is strange that we did not refer to the institutional structures which had successfully delivered the Asian Games in 1982. The 1982 Asian Games had a special organizing committee, with a cabinet minister level person heading it (Buta Singh). This was not only the nodal coordinating body but also had overriding powers over other agencies to ensure a holistic approach. None of the glitches CWG 2010 went through seem to have affected the 1982 Asian Games.
The other case in point is the conduct of the Melbourne CWG 2006. A large Indian contingent – comprising, among others, officials of the central and state (Delhi) government and the IOA secretary – visited Melbourne to make an on-the-spot study of their governance structure. The regional government of Victoria was made responsible for the overall supervision and conduct of CWG 2006 through a specifically formed cabinet sub-committee, drawn from key departments, and chaired by the prime minister. There was a specially appointed minister for the CWG (Justin Madden), and he was responsible for administering the Commonwealth Games Arrangements Act 2001. Under the Act, he had wide-ranging powers for the planning and the delivery of the games infrastructure which included venues, project orders and crowd management. This clearly established the fact that the games were the sole responsibility of the government and a clear hierarchical and unitary structure was created for its management. It is rather surprising that the huge Indian contingent of 139 people who went to study this did not come back and report these facts to their parent departments.
Most importantly, it was only to help the government in this regard that we took the initiative for the study report in July 2009. The purpose of the study was to give specific recommendations – considering the complexity and multiplicity of activities and the different claims and counter-claims of the participating departments, there was a need to rethink the entire governance model for the timely delivery of the games. There was no attempt to criticize or find fault. The objective was to help the government in its endeavour to stage a world-class CWG which would do India and Indians all over the globe proud.
On the first page of the report, it has been specifically mentioned:
We hope that the report, which has been prepared by us as independent auditors with an arm’s-length approach from the implementing agencies, will serve as a checklist and a ready reckoner to benchmark further progress toward preparing the infrastructure and in staging the games [...] Much time has been lost and it is imperative to move forward with the new found sense of urgency tempered by the realization that crashing of timelines and bunching of decisions carry with it the heightened risk of compromising transparency, accountability and structural safety of the venues.
Despite such warnings, with twelve days to go for the games, a suspension pedestrian overbridge near Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, the main venue, collapsed.
An intriguing event in the CWG saga was the appointment of a high level committee on 15 October 2010 (the games ended on 14 October 2010) to examine irregularities, if any, that had been committed by any agency. This came on the back of an atmosphere rife with allegations of wrongdoing. Every activity invited adverse notice. The electronic media made a certain toilet in the Games Village – and the organizing committee’s Lalit Bhanot’s statement that the standards of hygiene in India are different – famous across the globe, to drive home the country’s unpreparedness. Possibly to downplay such allegations and to quell the groundswell on the very morrow of the closing ceremony of the games, the constitution of a high level committee, with its chairman having the status of Supreme Court judge, was announced by the government, to examine the ‘weaknesses in management, alleged misappropriation, irregularities, wasteful expenditure and wrongdoing in the conduct of the games’ and recommend action.
The chair of the committee was a former CAG, V.K. Shunglu. This is rather strange because, on the one hand, the government was crying hoarse about the excesses of the three Cs – the CAG, the CVC and the CBI – and, on the other hand, it was getting a probe done obviously in addition to what the CAG would do – thus scoring a self-goal. I distinctly remember ringing up the cabinet secretary, K.M. Chandrasekhar, to ascertain if what the papers were saying was indeed true. Chandrasekhar, at home due to a foot ailment, evinced no information. The argument that the committee would deliver its findings earlier than the CAG audit also didn’t hold water, as the CAG audits had telescoped the timespan and were appearing rather fast. Any further collapsing of time would not be fair to the audited entities as they would not get a fair opportunity to respond to the queries against them. In fact, we did submit our report, all of its 743 pages, by about February 2011.
Excerpted with permission from Not Just An Accountant by Vinod Rai, Rupa Publications India.
