Concerns and controversies over the 2010 Commonwealth Games

A number of concerns and controversies surfaced before the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, India, which received widespread media coverage both in India (the host nation) and internationally.

The Commonwealth Games was severely criticised by several prominent Indian politicians and social activists because billions of dollars have been spent on the sporting event despite the fact that India has one of the world's largest concentration of poor people. Additionally, several other problems related to the 2010 Commonwealth Games have been highlighted by Indian investigative agencies and media outlets; these include – serious corruption by officials of the Games' Organising Committee, delays in the construction of main Games' venues, infrastructural compromise, possibility of a terrorist attack, and exceptionally poor ticket sales before the event.

Miloon Kothari, a leading Indian expert on socio-economic development, remarked that the 2010 Commonwealth Games will create "a negative financial legacy for the country" and asked "when one in three Indians lives below the poverty line and 40% of the hungry live in India, when 46% of India's children and 55% of women are malnourished, does spending billions of dollars on a 12-day sports event build national pride or is it a matter of national shame?"

One of the outspoken critics of the Games is Mani Shankar Aiyar, former Indian Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports. In April 2007, Aiyar commented that the Games are "irrelevant to the common man" and criticized the Indian government for sanctioning billions of dollars for the Games even though India requires massive investment in social development programs. In July 2010, he remarked that he would be "unhappy if the Commonwealth Games are successful".

Azim Premji called the 2010 Commonwealth Games a "drain on public funds" and said that hosting the high-expense Games in India is not justified given that the country had more important priorities facing it, such as education, infrastructure and public health.

Nearly 400,000 people from three large slum clusters in Delhi have been relocated since 2004. Gautam Bhan, an Indian urban planner with the University of California-Berkeley, said that the 2010 Commonwealth Games have resulted in "an unprecedented increase in the degree, frequency and scale of indiscriminate evictions without proper resettlement. We haven’t seen these levels of evictions in the last five years since the Emergency."

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