By Soroor Ahmed, TwoCircles.net,
There is no dearth of cricket experts who squarely blame too much of cricket, especially the IPL, for the 4-0 rout in Test series in Australia, which followed a similar result in England last summer. It is also being argued that the players have become much more money-minded and the IPL has greatly affected their talent to play Test matches.
But the one aspect which failed to attract the people’s attention is that the IPL––and ODIs too––are not just influencing the Test cricket negatively, but they also have detrimental impact on education, irrigation, trade and industry. Unlike many western countries India is a power-starved nation, where the state is failing in its duty to provide enough electricity to farmers to irrigate their land, children to study, shopkeepers to run their business and industrialists to run their plants. Millions of houses all over the country go without power even in the 21st century. In many pockets of the country fridges, gifted as dowry, are used as shelves to keep books. Roads in many cities, not to speak of villages, remain permanently dark.
Yet we provide power for weeks together for our cricketers to play the IPL and other matches to bring honour to the country. The result is very much before us. Unlike occasional ODI games, football, hockey, tennis matches and Commonwealth Games the IPL has become a routine phenomenon which continues for a couple of months every year. We do not have any calculation of how much power each match consumes yet we can say that the entire stadium and its adjoining area are brightened up like a sunny day so that a batsman can negotiate the bowling as fast 160-odd km per hour. The power consumed in every day-night match is enough to bring ray of hope in thousands of houses and irrigate large tract of land. Yet the students and farmers are denied this opportunity and traders and factory owners had to rely on generators which cause pollution problem. We are going for nuclear energy and alternative mode of power yet we have not taken any step to check the huge wastage of electricity.
The production of power causes a lot of displacement. A large number of villages and a few townships have got submerged into history. Many of those displaced have not yet been rehabilitated and compensated. Besides, it needs huge amount of coal, water etc to run a power plant. Environmentalists are opposed to the construction of mega-power projects, especially in the seismic zones, as they can wreak havoc when earthquake strikes the region.
The citizens are repeatedly asked to save power. The Green campaigners often appeal to observe one-hour voluntary power cut. In May 2008 the then West Bengal governor, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, announced that Raj Bhawan would observe two-hour voluntary power cut daily––one hour in afternoon and another in the evening.
We often come across advertisements asking the consumers to put off the fan and bulb whenever they go out of the room. This may be a good move. But then why no voice is raised over the extravagant expenditure of electricity in the IPL matches when they do not involve the national team. The IPLs are purely business venture.
India had won matches and cricket tournaments even in those days when there was no day-night games. Unlike other sports which ends in a couple of hours, even Twenty-20 matches, at least take four hours or more of power. The 50-50 match take 7-8 hours.
When the day-night Champions’ Trophy matches were going on in Jaipur and other cities of India in late 2006 farmers of Sriganganagar in Rajasthan were on warpath demanding more irrigation facilities. The agitation even caused several casualties. Yet no one paid attention towards this cruel joke.
When in the post-globalization era there is need of more power between sun-down and sun-up, especially for the BPO industry, we are burning our priceless energy to fiddle.