2 min readNew DelhiAug 10, 2010 03:11 PM IST
First published on: Aug 10, 2010 at 03:11 PM IST
At the Idea Exchange programme with The Indian Express on Tuesday afternoon,Delhi’s Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit assured that the Commonwealth Games would be “alright”.
Dikshit said she had felts nervous for China when she visited Beijing just two months before the Olympics. “Nothing was ready. Nobody knew what was going on. There was a dust haze all over. None of the stadiums were prepared,” she told Idea Exchange.
Commonwealth Games comes soon after my Beijing nervousness. It will be alright,” she added.
The chief minister said most of the construction debris – almost 82,000 tonnes – had been removed from the Capital. “Whatever remains is the job of the construction agencies to clear,” she said,adding: “This has been a difficult task with a multiplicity of agencies involved. There was an absence of coordination with various contractors hired by them.”
She also confronted the barrage of criticism for the Commonwealth Games and said all those who have wagged their tongues against it were “unpatriotic”. She said: “Why ask now? Why didn’t you say anything two years ago?”
Dikshit was referring to Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyer’s recent broadside that he would have been happy if the Games were a failure because he thought the money spent on the Games would be better utilised in training young talent. She said: “He has always been sceptical about the Games.”
On the clouds looming over Games committee chief Suresh Kalmadi after the allegations of financial irregularities,Dikshit said: “Officials of the Games Organising Committee have stopped signing files. Kalmadi represents the CWG Federation and he says he will not resign. There is nothing we can do about it.”
Diskshit signed off by saying: “We should have had more positive publicity for the Games.”
Dikshit also said she was ready to host the 2019 Asian Games if the Union government tells her to. “The Cabinet obviously has to take a decision to bid for these games. The Asian Games are in a much smaller scale than the CWG. We already have the infrastructure and we will be ready,” she said.
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