Commonwealth Games plagued by chaos and controversy 
India's weightlifting team has been hit by a doping scandal. Sponsors have pulled out. There is no sign of the hundreds of thousands of tourists expected to flow in through the city's rebuilt airport, nor of the approach roads that were going to link its new £1.2bn terminal to the city. Top athletes – and the Queen – will be absent. Only last night a trio of top English athletes - world triple jump champion Phillips Idowu, 400m runner Christine Ohuruogu and 1500m champion Lisa Dobriskey, pulled out of the games, although none cited safety as a concern.
The white plastic canopy stretched over the reconditioned terraces glowed purple and red. Fresh paint gleamed in the late monsoon rain. The air-conditioning and mobile toilets were "first class", said workers. But the crowd outside the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium in central Delhi were not there to admire the venue that will host the opening ceremony of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in less than two weeks time. They were there to gawp at twisted wreckage - the evidence of the latest disaster to hit the troubled event.
This was billed as the moment when India would stride proudly out onto the world stage. But today saw the 19th Commonwealth Games sinking only further into chaos and recrimination.
It had already been a bad day for the event, even before 23 labourers were injured when a crucial bridge linking the athletes' car park to the main stadium collapsed in the early afternoon. Officials arriving ahead of overseas teams had found rooms in the £150m Commonwealth Games village - built on a greenfield site on the outskirts of this city of 17 million – to be "unsafe and unfit for human habitation". This despite the fact that the village is due to open on Thursday.
Some rooms had been flooded out by monsoon rains. In others showers, air conditioning and electrical sockets were not working, while toilets were described as "filthy". With local press reporting that only 18 of the 34 accommodation blocks were complete, team leaders from England, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, Australia and Canada all expressed shock and concern.
Craig Hunter, England's chef de mission, revealed he was calling for safety assurances from the organisers. "It's hard to cancel an event of this magnitude but we are close to the wire, and teams may start to take things into their own hands," he told the Press Association. "Athletes will start getting on planes soon and decisions will have to be made. We need new levels of reassurance."
Some even threw doubt on whether the games could go ahead. New Zealand's chef de mission, Dave Currie, said: "The way things are looking, it's not up to scratch. The reality is that if the village is not ready and athletes can't come, the implications are that it's not going to happen." The Commonwealth Games Federation president, Michael Fennell, described the whole two-week event as "seriously compromised".
His words came as little surprise to observers. The list of problems with the games has lengthened over recent weeks to include corruption scandals, huge cost overruns, shoddy construction that means completed facilities with leaky roofs or subsiding floors. International sports events in any country routinely attract negative press in the run-up – see the fuss in South Africa earlier this year – only for the warnings to come to nothing.
But on this occasion it is likely that many projects will simply not be finished at all. The problems are manifest. Holes dug ubiquitously in an effort to "beautify" the Indian capital – millions of pot plants were to be planted – have contributed to an outbreak of dengue fever. The holes were left unfilled, stagnant water collected and mosquitos bred in their millions.
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pankaj kumar
New Delhi, India
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