FEA TURE —D ELHI 2010 CO MMONWEAL TH GAMES
Above & right: Yamuna Stadium ON TRACK & OFF TRACK
—venue seats 6,000 featuring two show courts (and practice courts).
down at the weightlifting venue; the Head of the Com- monwealth Games Federation wasreportedascalling the brand-new and allegedly luxury high-rise apart- ments built to accommodate the athletes “filthyand uninhabitable”; and finally, there were the warnings from a number of national teams prior to the commencement of the eventthatthey maynot attend if things didn’t improvemorequickly than seemed
possible.And this was all before the event had even started! Nonetheless,itmay be thatthe problem-plagued
and at times embarrassing Games were a game-changer after all, though in a manner far more profound for Indi- ans — and the world — than some fleeting gee-whiz headlines in the world's media. “Itjust maybethatthis could be the catalystfor the
long-overdue reform of the Indian bureaucracy,”said Deutsche Bank's chief economist for Asia, Michael Spen- cer. “It's amajor impedimentand this is the golden opportunitytoundertake the real root-and-branch reform thathas been long
promised.Thatwould be a massive step forward; to clean it up comprehensively.” The result was not pretty when the Indian civil service
took control of the Delhi Games—corruption, waste and inefficiency, obfuscation and a cancerous lack of account- abilityinofficialdom —and all of it on amassivescale. India's daunting civil service is supposed to be the pride of the nation but instead its malfunction and malgovern- ancehold India
back.Partofthe problem is its sizeand
SPR IN G 20 11
power. India employs about 4 million civil servants, with another 7to8million in its 35 statesand
territories.Itis the world's biggest civil service, bigger even than China's, which has about 15 per cent morepeople to administer than India. Some economists have calculated that India's bureaucratic inefficiencycosts the country1to2points in annual growth. Today, it has developed to the point that it presents as a major obstacle not just to India's eco- nomic growth and private-sectorefficiency, but to the world’s. American economist LantPritchett,ofHarvard's
Kennedy School of Government, has described the Indi- an bureaucracyas“one of the world's top10biggest problems”, up there with AIDS and climate change.
Need for Change When he took officein2004, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged that administrative reform“at every level” wasakey concernofhis government. But littlehas changed in the intervening seven years. Problems con- tinue to dog the efforts of the Singh Governmentwith the removal by the Supreme Court in March 2011 of the anti-corruption chief—
P.J.Thomas as Head of the CVC — over (you guessed it), corruption. This is at a time when 28% of sitting lower-house members of parliament also face criminal charges or inquiries. India vaults ahead but that is primarily because of a restless, energetic pri- vatesector. NowSingh has achance. He took charge of
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