By IANS,
New Delhi : The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report on the Commonwealth Games (CWG) has blamed the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) for appointing Suresh Kalmadi as chief of the Organising Committee (OC) despite objections from the then sports minister Sunil Dutt.
The report, which was tabled in parliament Friday and points to “enormous bungling”, said: “In our opinion, the decision of the PMO for appointing Suresh Kalmadi as the Chairman of the OC facilitated the conversion of the originally envisaged government-owned OC into a body effectively outside governmental control.
“Despite strenuous objections from the erstwhile (Sports) Minister, late Shri Sunil Dutt, Kalmadi was appointed the OC Chairman, based on a PMO recommendation of December 2004,” said the 743-page report, released to the press by deputy CAG Rekha Gupta.
It added that Mani Shankar Aiyar, who was the sports minister in 2007, and officials attempted to highlight the “ineffective position of (the ministry) in exercising control over the OC to the PMO and GoM (group of ministers)…
“This was, however, met with strong resistance from the chairman OC and did not yield the desired results.
“In the absence of a clear governance structure, a multiplicity of coordination committees were created, disbanded and reconstituted at different points of time which led to complete diffusion of accountability,” the report stated.