2014 Commonwealth Games venues 'behind schedule'

Key venues for the 2014 Commonwealth Games are behind schedule for completion and ministers have not formed a plan for handling future problems, auditors have found.

A report by Audit Scotland said the new national indoor sports arena is being delayed, along with the revamp of the national swimming centre in Glasgow.

The report was written before organisers admitted this week there was £81 million ‘black hole’ in the event’s budget, but predicted the original £373 million cost could escalate.

It highlighted “unrealistic assumptions” by officials and warned that, with public spending facing a squeeze, cutbacks may have to be made.

All the venues are expected to be built in time for the games, but the report warned there is not much margin for error as some are scheduled for completion just a few months beforehand.

Scottish ministers have also failed to draw up a risk management plan to help ensure there are no further cost overruns.

Bill Aitken, a Tory Glasgow MSP, said: “Unless a firm hand is exercised, this project could spiral out of all control.”

Ross Finnie, Scottish Liberal Democrat sport spokesman, said: “The report confirms our fears that Monday’s storm of excuses for the budget increase won’t be the last.

“We’re likely to see the budget creep up and the Scottish government’s budget will have to be raided to plug the gaps.”

The report found new venues, such as the national indoor sports arena and the velodrome, are running behind completion estimates of March 2010 by 21 months.

The Cathkin Braes cycling course is now expected to be complete in March 2012, almost three years late, and the refurbishment of Glasgow Green hockey complex is not due to be completed until March 2013, 18 months late.

Meanwhile, the finishing date for the Kelvingrove bowls complex has slipped from September 2010 to August 2012.

And the refurbishment of the national swimming centre in Glasgow has been delayed from December 2011 until June 2012. The athletes' village is not due be ready until February 2014.

Hampden Park is due to host track and field events and the closing ceremony, while the triathlon will be held at Strathclyde Country Park.

Although refurbishment of both are on schedule has not been delayed, they will not be ready until March 2014, four months before the games start.

For this reason, the report noted the two venues and the athletes’ village “present a higher risk if there is any delay to their current timescales.”

“The experience of previous major capital projects is that there is a high risk of slippage, therefore these should also be closely monitored,” it concluded.

“Potentially unrealistic assumptions” included the level of sponsorship for the Games. The £81 million cost overrun announced this week was blamed on the income from the sale of TV rights being overestimated.

Caroline Gardner, Deputy Auditor General for Scotland, said organisers “need to continue to monitor and review the budget assumptions regularly.”

The Scottish Executive said the report provided a “snapshot” of planning for the Games until August this year, and “substantial progress” had been made since.

Delhi hardsells 2010 Games at its pavilion

Inaugurating the Delhi Pavillion at the 29th India International Trade Fair, chief minister Sheila Dikshit took the opportunity to build momentum for the Commonwealth Games 2010 also the theme for this year's Delhi Pavillion. With Games mascot Shera dancing away at the entrance and the stalls inside highlighting all development works being carried out in the city, visitors will get a glimpse of the changing face of Delhi.

"The theme has been selected with an aim to get ready for a big international sports event. The pavillion will help inculcate a sense of pride among people so that Delhi can host a successful Commonwealth Games,'' Dikshit said.

The Delhi Pavillion is showcasing the all-round development that has taken place in the city over the past 10 years. From Metro, AC buses to infrastructure development, visitors get a glimpse of all under one roof. Industries minister Haroon Yusuf, finance minister Dr AK Walia and health minister Prof Kiran Walia accompanied Dikshit around the pavillion.

The chief minister stated that due to constraints of space, the state government has not been able to put up enough stalls to showcase its achievements in all the major fields. "However, achievements in the field of Mission Convergence, environment, education, transport, health, water supply, IT, industries, social welfare, art & culture, bhagidari, etc, have been disseminated in a forceful manner,'' she emphasised.

A stall put up by the Tihar Central Jail attracted visitors in large numbers. A number of private traders and companies have also put up their stalls which are selling handicraft items among other things.

Later at a press conference, the CM stated that the first ever industrial policy of Delhi was almost ready and will be cleared by the Cabinet and brought before the legislative Assembly. This will be first ever industrial policy of Delhi after the capital was given the present set up of a legislative Assembly and a council of ministers.

The new policy would concentrate on IT, service sector and electronic industries as non-polluting industry is allowed to be set up in the Capital city. Dikshit expressed confidence that the new industrial policy will give fillip to economic development.

Big budget security revamp for railway stations in Delhi, NCR

Within a year, important railway stations in and around the Capital will boast of security similar to the snazzy airports.

Work on a massive upgrade of the security arrangement at the 10 most important stations in Delhi and its neighbourhood has started with a sanctioned budget of more than Rs 23 crore.

Apart from mega-terminal stations like New Delhi, Old Delhi and Nizamuddin, satellite stations such as Ghaziabad and Anand Vihar too will come under the comprehensive security net.

The scale of the work -- with access control, scanning of baggage and interception and screening of vehicles to explosives-detection and disposal -will turn the stations into virtual fortresses.

The Integrated Security System, as the upgrade work is called, gains importance because of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

"We will be comfortably ready for the Commonwealth Games.
The sheer enormity of the deployment of security systems acts as a deterrent," said Vivek Sahai, general manager of Northern Railway.

Once the system is in place, all baggage will be screened through X-ray machines eliminating the need for manual check.

More security personnel will be carrying handheld metal and explosive detectors, while automatic machines will scan cars for bombs.

In terms of volume, it is a tenfold increase in the security arrangement. The salient feature of the plan is to bring the smaller stations like Delhi Sarai Rohilla, Delhi Cantonment and Shadara into the integrated security plan.

"The smaller stations have been the vulnerable spots in railway security, compromising the security of the bigger stations as well. Now we will plug those holes," said a senior railway official.

More than 223 security cameras are being brought in to weave a network of electronic surveillance .

Sahai said the revamp would also help during the Kumbh Mela, the biggest congregation of humans in the world, next year.

"The massive number of people using railways across North India will put tremendous pressure on security. The new system will help tackle that rush easily," he said

Handsoff Approach- Labourers Find Work Prospects At Games Sites Disappointing

Vinod Mistry is sitting at a labour chowk--a place where men gather in search of construction jobs --in south Delhi's Kotla Mubarakpur neighbourhood. He hasn't found work in the six days he has waited at the spot for a contractor to hire him.
Mistry is surrounded by 10 other men, all from villages around Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh.

Nearly 200 more men are waiting similarly at various points on the road that leads from Kotla Mubarakpur to Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, where a Rs550 crore renovation is under way for the October 2010 Commonwealth Games. It's already 11am, and it looks like most of them will have to go another day without work.

"We used to get between 15 and 20 days of work (every month) till a year ago. But this year has been bad, we're getting much less work," says Mistry, 30, who has left his wife and children behind in his village and come to the capital for work.

With less than a year left, work is being accelerated on Commonwealth Games venues and city infrastructure as New Delhi prepares to host its biggest sporting spectacular since the 1982 Asian Games. For construction workers, though, it hasn't meant boom times.

At least Rs3,100 crore was going to be spent on the renovation of the 10 main games venues, and if expenditure on ancillary projects such as the construction of flyovers, roads and hotels was taken into account, the total spending was forecast to be above Rs25,000 crore. Besides generating jobs for a significant percentage of an estimated 800,000 construction workers--migrants settled in Delhi--the building binge could have been the perfect opportunity to register labourers, standardize wages and improve working conditions, activists say. That hasn't happened.

Less than 10km away from Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium is Shivaji Stadium, another Games venue, where a worker from Assam peers through a gap in the tall barricades that surround the construction site.
The guards positioned at the site gates don't let construction workers leave without the permission of their subcontractor.

The worker, who didn't want to be identified says he has assured work, but that it pays only Rs110 a day, well below both the minimum wage of Rs140, and the prevailing rate at the labour chowks. It's also much below the rate proclaimed by a sign painted on one of the barricades that says "Contractor: China Railway Shisiju Group Corporation, labour per day: Rs145".

"The conditions are tough", the worker says. "We can be made to work at any time of day or night, there's no overtime, and a hut made of a few tin sheets houses an entire family."

The human factor In anticipation of such a situation, Citizens for Workers, Women and Children (CWGCWC), a coalition of 20 individuals and organizations, was created a little over two years ago.

The members came from diverse backgrounds, including trade unions, non-government organizations working with children, researchers and government officials. Their goal, as Devika Singh, one of the founder-members, puts it was to "look at the human factor in big construction".

Subhash Bhatnagar of Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sangam (NMPS), a trade union, has been at the forefront of the campaign. His small office in Rohini, far from the hubbub of central and south Delhi where most of the Commonwealth Games action is focused, is cluttered with hundreds of files.

According to Bhatnagar, there's been an influx of nearly 150,000 migrants from across the country into New Delhi who have an advantage over locals when it comes to construction jobs--they can be paid less, made to work longer and are unlikely to protest or create trouble.

"Exactly the same thing happened during the Asian Games, the only difference is that today we have a detailed set of laws that looks after the welfare of construction workers." He's referring to the Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers Act (BOCW Act) that was passed way back in 1996.

The very comprehensive Act requires builders to register their workers and stipulates that any organization doing construction work involving more than Rs10 lakh should deposit between 1% and 2% of the total with the Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board.

It also looks at on-site safety measures, facilities for workers and their children, provides for pensions, financial assistance to meet medical expenses, and school scholarships for children. Till date the board has collected at least Rs300 crore, of which Rs150 crore is from Games-related projects.

The Games, Bhatnagar believes, were Delhi's best shot at implementing the provisions of the Act. The construction was concentrated at a manageable number of sites, and since most of the work was being done by government agencies, monitoring would have been easier.
Wasted opportunity While the Act does not deal directly with wages, it would have allowed the government to keep track of the number of workers involved in every project, and, therefore, indirectly of the wages. The cost associated with providing "decent" living facilities, as required by the Act, could have deterred contractors from relying solely on immigrant labour.

But the welfare board has so far registered only 18,000 workers, says a member of the board who did not want to be named. Rules require that these registrations be renewed every three months. But most workers find it difficult to take time off to do that, with the result that most have lapsed.

The board has neither hired any dedicated staff nor does it have an office. It relies on organizations such as NMPS and Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) to register workers. It has so far processed two applications for pensions and distributed 10 scholarships.

Board members accuse the builders of not cooperating in the registration of workers. f Builders are reluctant to part with information about their workers, says one member, since "they're afraid that they will be held accountable for them or that they (workers) will be poached by other l builders".

When asked about the number of registered workers at the Commonwealth Games village site, Emaar MGF Land Ltd said that the information was only available with Ahluwalia Contracts (India) Ltd, the main contractor on the site. Ahluwalia Contracts chief executive officer Arun Sahai, however, referred Mint back to Emaar MGF.

H.S. Pasricha of the Builders Association of India lobs the ball right back into the board's court. The Builders Association, he says, has been trying to provide workers more facilities. It's the lack of staff with the board that is the problem.
By the time it processes a worker's application, the worker has often been shifted to another site.

"Some builders ask us why they should register workers and pay their registration fee, when the worker is quite likely to shift to another contractor in a month's time?" No access Access to the sites has also been a problem. Board members claim that while they're responsible for the labourers on these sites, they don't have access to them since the sites belong to Union government agencies such as the Sports Authority of India and Central public works department.

NGOs that have tried to access the workers at the Commonwealth Games sites have also had a difficult time.

"The sites are like fortresses," says Anjali Alexander of Mobile Creches, which runs a crèche for workers' children at the Jawaharlal Nehru and Shivaji stadiums. "It has taken us three-four months just to get access to the sites, after which it takes a month to set up the crèche."

The end result is that there is still no real monitoring mechanism in place.

Meanwhile, the number of unemployed workers at Delhi's 700 or so labour chowks is slowly increasing.

And, a study released by CWC in October says the immigrant workers at the Games sites continue to be exploited.
"Most work for 9 hours or more; violation of workers' rights to minimum wage is widespread; and less than 1% of them have heard of the wel are board."

"It's an opportunity lost," says Alexander. If the Games venues are to be ready on time the bulk of the construction workers will have to be out by February 2010. "All we've real y achieved is to bring some issues to the fore."

The Commonwealth Games Organizing Committee has adopted a hands-off approach to the labour issue. When asked, Sudhir Sobti, director of communications, said he was unaware of any effort by the commitee to monitor the condition of workers at the Games venues.