If Shanghai has the World Expo 2010, Delhi has the Commonwealth Games 2010.

For the last two years, a huge digital clock in the office of the Chief Minister of Delhi has been counting down the time (in months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds) to October 14, when the Commonwealth Games 2010 will be inaugurated. This countdown has set the terms of the discourse on the future of the city since 2003, when Delhi won its bid to host the Games, defeating the Canadian city of Hamilton by forty-six votes to twenty-two, to the surprise of many. By all accounts, it was a close call—the technical evaluation judged both bids as equally worthy of consideration, and concerns were expressed about security given the bomb explosions in railway stations and other public places in Mumbai in late 2002 and early 2003. What tipped the scale in favor of the Indian bid was money—the bid document included an “overriding undertaking and therefore binding commitment. …that the Governments of India and Delhi will support both capital costs and significant operational costs as well as provide an underwriting against any operating or capital budget shortfall.”Footnote ¹

The original budget projection in the bid document—US$422 million—has long been forgotten. According to the latest calculations, the total bill for the Games will be on the order of $1.6 billion. This does not include the costs of nonsports infrastructure such as roads, airports, and the Metro Rail. The total amount of money spent so far on both sports and non-sports infrastructure stands at $3.2 billion. There have been several doses of top-up funding from the central government, the most recent being $1.5 million for outlays on “soft infrastructure like furnishing, facades and display elements.”Footnote ² While some of these costs will be recovered through sponsorships, tourism, broadcasting rights, and the sale of merchandise, the Games are proving to be an expensive proposition for the country.

The government of Delhi and the Games organizers are quick to point out that this bill is not unreasonable, given what Delhi is getting out of the Games. By October, Delhi will have 193 kilometers of Metro lines extending to the satellite cities of Gurgaon and Noida, a fleet of 6,000 new environmentally friendly buses, an airport designed to handle 34 million passengers a year, nine rapid transit corridors, ten new sports stadia, sixty new flyovers,Footnote ³ and several thousand kilometers of new roads. Monuments will be cleaned and restored, thousands of trees will be added to the city's green cover, the Yamuna River will be restored to life and health—these, say the organizers, will be the lasting legacy of the Games. They also point out that all of these improvements were in any case part of the long-term plans for Delhi—all the Games have done is speed up the process, such that ten years worth of work and expenditure have been packed into half the time. Senior officials in the Delhi administration cheerfully acknowledge that the Games have served as a kick in the pants for an otherwise lethargic bureaucracy.Footnote ⁴

However, even the most enthusiastic supporters of the transformation of Delhi “from Walled City to World City”Footnote ⁵ are now acknowledging that the balance sheet also includes some human costs.

The government estimates that there will be 3 million homeless people in Delhi by the end of the Games.Footnote ⁶ While the official view is that the majority of homeless people are beggars, vagrants, sex workers, and petty criminals who come into Delhi from neighboring states, human rights groups have collected evidence to prove that at least 100,000 families have been rendered homeless as a direct result of the Commonwealth Games. These numbers are likely to double just before the Games, when the temporary on-site housing put up at construction sites is dismantled and the workers are left to fend for themselves.

Evictions in Delhi during the lead-up to the Games have followed an efficient and ruthless pattern. The experience of the Yamuna Pushta settlement, one of the first to be targeted, is typical of the approach.Footnote ⁷ This 100-acre strip of land on the banks of the Yamuna River was earmarked for conversion into a promenade. The settlement was home to more than 35,000 working-class families (most of them Muslims) who had been occupying this land for over two decades, including workers who had been brought to Delhi by contractors during the construction boom created by the Asian Games of 1982.

Despite desperate efforts by the residents of the settlement, campaigns by nongovernmental organizations and community groups, and appeals to the courts, the so-called voluntary relocation program went ahead. In February and April 2004, hundreds of homes and community buildings were razed to the ground in twenty-four-hour operations. Residents, many of whom could not believe that a forced eviction could take place in the face of protests, were taken unaware. They had not even removed their belongings and possessions from their homes when the demolition started—in many cases, children and old people were still inside when the bulldozers started rolling. The police cordoned off the area, and those who resisted were mercilessly beaten and chased away. The ruined colony was then set on fire. There were at least five deaths.

It is estimated that 27,000 families were evicted from Pushta, of whom only 6,000 families were resettled. Resettlement plots were assigned only to those who could provide proof of residence. The Delhi Development Authority recorded only 16,000 “genuine claimants.” The rest—more than 100,000 people—were left with no alternative but to move into rented housing in some other informal settlement, as close to their workplaces as possible. Given the miserable conditions in resettlement colonies and the fact that they are located on the furthest outskirts of the city, one could argue that those who were resettled were as unfortunate as those who were not.Footnote ⁸

Similarly, one could argue that the homelessness that awaits construction workers at the Games sites when their jobs are done is not much worse than their present conditions. Although legally bound to pay minimum wages and provide basic amenities to workers, the intricate chain of contracts and subcontracts involved in each site makes it difficult to fix accountability and allows on-site contractors to violate labor laws with impunity. Attempts by trade union activists and human rights groups to organize workers and to bring pressure on contractors to meet their obligations were countered by measures to restrict access to the sites to “authorized personnel” only, on the grounds that the tight time and cost deadlines would not be met if workers were instigated against the contractors by these troublemakers. It took the intervention of the Delhi High Court for the government of Delhi to allow a Court-appointed monitoring committee access to the main sites.

The report of the monitoring committee bears out the findings of earlier reports by nongovernmental organizations and human rights groups. Workers are housed in inhuman conditions, in temporary shacks with no ventilation, toilets, drainage, safe water or privacy. Most contractors have not provided medical facilities, crèches, or schools for the children of workers. Minimum wages are not paid on all sites, and women are usually paid less than men. Most contractors do not provide safety equipment or enforce safety precautions, and accidents are common (as many as 125 accidents have been reported in the mainstream media). Almost all of the workers are migrants who are not registered with the Construction Workers' Welfare Board, and therefore are not eligible for benefits such as accident insurance and health care. There have been several deaths from accident or illness. These have been dealt with by paying off the family and sending them back home—there have been no inquests.

It seems incredible that the majority of people who live in Delhi are unaware of or unconcerned about the human costs of the Games, while uncritically celebrating the metamorphosis of Delhi from a city mired in the dusty past into a modern, dynamic, and investment-friendly “world city.” This is in contrast to the high level of public interest and outrage around the mismanagement and defalcation of funds by Games officials and contractors. Revelations of enormous amounts of money spent on “refreshments” at meetings of various Games committees, of norms being flouted and money flowing steadily into the pockets of a few contractors, of members of the Delhi legislature trying to grab flats in the Games Village, of public funds being used to cover cost escalations—these are discussed, condemned, and exemplary punishment demanded.Footnote ⁹ On the other hand, reports of human rights violations at construction sites and during evictions do not elicit anything near the same level of outrage.

This blindness and insensitivity toward the poor is the outcome of opinion-building strategies that tap into deep reservoirs of caste and religious prejudice. In a strange inversion of reality, privileged citizens of Delhi see themselves as victims of the poor whose mere presence in the city is felt to constitute a threat to both the economic and social order. Those who live in jhuggi-jhopdi coloniesFootnote ¹⁰ are demonized and stigmatized in various ways—as illegal migrants from Bangladesh or Nepal (even if they are registered as Indian voters); as beggars and petty criminals (despite the fact that they are almost all entrepreneurs or workers in the informal sector); or as people who make the city dirty (despite the fact that many work as municipal sweepers, rag-pickers, and garbage recyclers and are actively involved in keeping the city clean). Protests against evictions by activists and human rights groups are branded as part of a larger political conspiracy to change the demographics of Delhi and to create Muslim vote banks.

The idea of “cleaning up” the city by getting rid of the poor has a powerful resonance in a cultural context in which isolation and segregation to maintain purity and goodness are familiar tenets of spiritual practice. News reports that the Delhi administration is planning to send beggars and street children back to their states of origin, or confine them to six “holding areas” on the outskirts of the city for the duration of the Games,Footnote ¹¹ have not excited shock or horror, any more than the announcements that neighborhoods are to be cleared of stray dogs, or the hoardings with cute cartoon figures exhorting the public not to spit, throw garbage on the street, or otherwise disgrace Delhi in front of the visitors.

Putting up a good show for visitors is dictated not only by Indian traditions of hospitality—it is also an essential part of the larger game plan of urbanization in India. Indian cities are now seen by both global and national policy makers as ideal locations for the supply of high-end services, particularly in the financial and information and communication technology sectors. The makeover of Delhi is aimed at attracting foreign investments, high-end technologies and professional talent—and the Commonwealth Games are the perfect opportunity to showcase Delhi in this new avatar to an international audience of potential investors.

Such a future holds little or no possibilities for ill educated and unskilled migrants from rural areas, except in ill paid and insecure jobs in the informal sector. The increasingly precarious economics of survival in the informal sector and the growing chasm between disprivileged groups of workers and the work opportunities being created in high-tech service industries are leading to a visible increase in poverty—more old people begging at traffic lights, more families sleeping on the pavement, more children sorting through garbage dumps, more women looking for work no matter how meager the wage.

There is little sympathy for these people among more privileged citizens, whose commitment to the old values of charity, social solidarity, and concern for the less fortunate can no longer be taken for granted. Individual enterprise is seen as the route to salvation, and the poor are blamed for their own situation. Equity and welfare have been labeled as outdated concepts, and appeals to normative concepts of rights and justice arouse fury rather than concern. Analysis of the historical and structural causes of poverty is seen as irrelevant to modern times. At the same time, deeply ingrained notions of inborn privilege continue to block the development of a truly modern conception of citizenship based on equality.Footnote ¹²

The Games will come and go, and some of the ugly realities that are being shoved under the carpet will push their way back into the public domain. How will Delhi deal with them? Will the sanitized and class-segregated city that is being created for the visitors survive beyond the Games? Or will India's messy democracy reassert itself and remind the chief minister of Delhi that the less privileged of her fellow citizens also have a vote?