A DOZEN years after it was originally scheduled to organise the National Games, Punjab went through the exercise of holding the games in five different cities. If in the end, everyone felt that there was much to be desired in the way the games were conducted, the organising committee alone should not be blamed. The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) should share the blame in equal measure.
Organising such games in different cities is no easy task. Punjab would have realised it the hard way and, more pertinently, the IOA and its constituent units would have learnt it the bitter way.
In any multi-discipline games, ideal board and lodging arrangements would be half the battle won. Punjab spread it out too far and wide and had very little chance of coming up with a 'Games Village' or 'villages'. Even if it wanted to have one in a city like Ludhiana, on the lines of the planned 'village' in Hyderabad for the next Games, lack of interest among private builders proved a setback, if the Organising Committee Secretary-General, Mr. I. S. Bindra is to be believed.
The university and college hostels thus came into the picture. Even to arrange that took some doing. Complaints of unhealthy living conditions and choked and inadequate number of toilets came from all quarters. Food, in contrast, was appreciated at some centres, tolerated at some other places and trashed at a few others.
The Government College for Women at Ludhiana came in for praise, the DAV College at Jalandhar came in for criticism; the Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) hostels, at Ludhiana, were just about adequate, though many complained about the awful condition of the toilets. With winter just about setting in, pressure mounted on the National Games Organising Committee (NGOC) to provide 'durries' and blankets. Not all requests could be met straightaway and there were reports about competitors being forced to sleep on the floor.
The chef de mission of various contingents and technical officials were provided hotel accommodation, but there were as many outside the bracket who kept whining till the end. These included State Olympic Association office-bearers and sundry officials of the IOA and the federations. In fact, well before the closing ceremony, the NGOC asked many of the 'unauthorised' occupants of hotels to vacate their rooms or pay the tariffs themselves. These included a few IOA officials and their 'guests'.
It is for the IOA to lay down the norms about hospitality and stick to them. Otherwise, unsavoury scenes like the ones witnessed in the office of the Games Technical Director, Dr. D. K. Tandon, at Ludhiana, over accommodation, will keep repeating elsewhere in the future.
That brings us to Dr. Tandon's role. Obviously he took more than he could chew or else everything was dumped on him by the NGOC. Dr. Tandon, a former Director of the National Institute of Sports, Patiala, should have actually been looking into just the technical aspects of the games. Instead, he was allocating rooms to contingents and officials, tying up transport arrangements and sorting out accreditation hassles. In fact, he seemed to be in charge of almost everything in Ludhiana. And he did not have a work force which could carry out instructions with the utmost efficiency.
This surely was a folly. And we could realise its impact only when the athletic championships were about to roll on. Some entries had been directed towards Chandigarh. There could thus be no complete entry list for circulation to the media or to the technical officials. Nor could start lists be finalised since heats were yet to be drawn up. Someone was rushed to Chandigarh to take physical possession of the diverted entry lists. The delay was inevitable.
Worse, the track and field technical officials found to their dismay that there was not even a single photo-copying machine at their disposal. Of course, Tandon's office had one. But athletics required three for itself. At least two. Thanks to Mr. Bindra's intervention, at the behest of the media, one arrived on the morning of the opening day of athletics action. Two days before the athletics programme ended, that machine had packed up for good!
It was learnt that the Punjab Athletic Association Secretary, Mr. Ishar Singh Deol, who was also the Director of the Meet, would not heed the repeated requests of the AAFI officials to procure photo-copying machines on rent. What good was there of Mr. Deol and the PAA President, Mr. Umrao Singh, religiously 'gracing' the occasion by being present there at the stadium?
The Punjab association, against whom athletes of the State had carried out a signature campaign prior to the games, reportedly 'contributed' 150 officials to conduct the athletic meet. In practice, the show was run by the AAFI officials. Not a single marshal could be seen during the course of the six-day meet. The task was performed by some of the technical officials and the junior National coach, Mr. J. S. Saini, who also doubled up as the on-field announcer, with the help of the NCC cadets.
The shoddy technical arrangements for the athletic events including the goof-up on the pole vault and high jump pits showed up Dr. Tandon and co in very poor light. But worse was the inability of the NGOC to disburse TA/DA in time to track and field technical officials invited from other States.
The media really had a mixed bag. Harassed by the police during the opening and closing ceremonies at Ludhiana, the fourth estate was left to fend for itself during the athletic events as far as finding a press box was concerned. Much of the time the scribes, much against their wishes, huddled around an 'abandoned' timekeepers' stand.
That such a situation arose despite Mr. Bindra and the Deputy Commissioner and the Regional Committee Chairman, Mr. G. S. Sandhu, agreeing to the suggestion of this correspondent to make available a portion of the stands almost in line with the finish-line, for seating the mediapersons, was inexplicable. In fact promises were made that the area would not only be cordoned off but tables and chairs plus plug-points provided for those wanting to use their laptops. In the end, that section of the VIP stands was occupied by the public. Of course the tables never arrived. Things improved a little when football shifted to the city from the semifinal stage. In fact, football was better managed in Jalandhar as well.
A Press box was hard to find at any of the other main centres, The Sportstar team reported. If in the hurriedly-built shooting range at Mohali, there was hardly any space for the cameramen to take up positions, leave alone pressmen to sit, in the small indoor hall at the Guru Nanak Stadium in Ludhiana, three chairs and a table were reserved for the Press on the day of the basketball semifinals and final. Till then there was not even that. At the volleyball venue, things were better organised, but the same indoor hall was chaotic for the handball competition.
By and large the media centres had enough facilities, with the one at Patiala coming in for special praise from our team members. Lack of proper furniture and inadequate number of phones with STD facility did hamper the work in Ludhiana, but thanks to the cooperating staff in the Public Relations and Communications departments, the problems were overcome in due course.
As for the information flow, arrangements for table tennis and badminton should be lauded while the AAFI, despite the constraints, managed a decent job in athletics. Patiala exceeded the expectations in this aspect. At many other venues, Trident, the agency entrusted with the task of managing the games website, also did a competent job of compiling the results, though in some cases it was not able to keep up with the pace demanded by the media.
A word about the IOA. If this apex sports body in the country thinks that its job starts and ends with allotting the National Games, plus in giving a few speeches at the opening and closing ceremonies, then the games better be wound up. Without going into the roles played by those IOA officials who were directly responsible to liaise with the NGOC months before the games began, it must be pointed out that they should be assigned specific tasks and made accountable. Invariably, such officials tend to become a burden on the organising committee.
The IOA would do well to compile a technical handbook in which everything related to the games would be explained without any ambiguity. Eligibility is a topic which has time and again created havoc with the games and this one was no exception. That different sets of rules were followed in different disciplines only added to the acrimony that surfaced at several centres as the games progressed.
If Jharkhand had a grouse that one of its key players, Nishant Kumar, was barred after playing a match in basketball, on the ground that he could not fulfil the six-month residential status to back his domicile claim, Karnataka found to its dismay that Madhya Pradesh was allowed to field many Chhattisgarh players in handball. Jharkhand protested in vain that two of its athletes, P. S. Primesh and Harwant Kaur, were allowed to represent Kerala and Punjab respectively. They had, earlier in the year, turned out for Jharkhand in National meets.
There has to be a uniform eligibility code. Otherwise it will become a mockery. There has to be a jury of appeal, too, not just for each and every discipline but also a Games Jury of Appeal to sort out issues relating to eligibility and biased decisions of the federations.
There should have been a Central Control Room at Ludhiana. Nothing remotely resembling such a set-up was available. Once the opening ceremony was over, one could not spot any NGOC big-wig at Ludhiana, forget the top-brass of the IOA. Everyone returned towards the closing stages or for the closing ceremony itself. Maybe that is what matters to most in the IOA - the opening and closing. That is where you make speeches, buttress your arguments about hosting the Afro-Asian Games. Damn the National Games.
Mercifully, the competitors did not have that kind of an attitude. They participated in full strength and fought all the way, making us wonder whether all the criticism about the games being a huge waste was really the truth.
Punjab finished way ahead in the medals race, while the Services, which did not find a place from 1985 to 1997 in the games, crept up to be second. Kerala, despite preparing well, came a lowly fifth, behind Manipur and even Delhi. The cancellation of the aquatic events affected Kerala and Karnataka's tally considerably.
While a State like Kerala announced its cash awards, including Rs. 1 lakh for an individual gold, well in advance, Tamil Nadu followed suit before the Games began and Karnataka and Punjab did that just after the Games. As for Delhi, the State administration was not even willing to foot the travelling expenditure of the contingent in the first place. Is it not time that the Capital set an example?
Comments
SHARE