By IANS,
New Delhi: A day after the excitement and enthusiasm about the Commonwealth Games subsided, an NGO asked if the endeavour was a necessary expenditure or a wasteful extravagance.
“For all the international games like Olympics and the Commonwealth games, never except at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, has a host city ever recorded profits from hosting the events. Such big events have almost every time plunged the hosts into debt for over 25-30 years,” said Dunnu Roy, director of the NGO Hazards Centre.
Roy said that direct infrastructure related expenses amounting to Rs.56,000 crore and indirect expenses of Rs.46,000 crore, made the 12-day sporting event a Rs.102,000 crore affair. That, he said, was nearly equal to the amount spent on the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Roy released a study by Hazards Centre Friday, which contains an array of facts related to the Games that aims to incite people to question the prudence and intentions in hosting the multi-crore sporting showcase.
It indicts the authorities for not only the expenditure it terms as wasteful but for displacing 40,000 beggars, 300,000 street vendors, and demolition of numerous slum dwellings that has caused countless poor citizens of Delhi to become homeless.