The remodelled Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, the venue for the athletics events and opening and closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games, was inaugurated by the Union Sports Minister, M.S. Gill, on Tuesday.
This was one of the stadia that had run into several delays and its completion brought great relief to Gill, the Delhi Chief Minister, Sheila Dikshit, and the Organising Committee (OC) Chairman, Suresh Kalmadi, apart from hundreds of others engaged in the organisational efforts of the Games.
All the three dignitaries praised the work done by the CPWD engineers and the workers. Gill spoke about the foreign engineers, too, and their role in completing the complex structure of a roof for the stadium.
The PTFE (polytetrafluroethylene) membrane roof is a novelty in India. Gill described the roof as a group of swans in flight.
Partial roof
The roof, reportedly costing around Rs. 300 crore, however, may not be able to protect spectators, athletes and the media completely from the rains. It is only a partial roof that does not have a sliding mechanism.
It can at best save the majority of the spectators from the sun. The back rows on top will be safe from the rains.
The stadium, reconstructed from the 1982 structure that was built for the Asian Games, has a seating arrangement at the bottom tier that is lower than what was available originally. The upper tiers now have individual seats compared to the cemented galleries earlier.
Rebuilt at a cost of Rs. 961 crore, the stadium will have a capacity of 60,000 compared to the 75,000 it had in 1982. The nine-lane 400m track, with a 10-lane straight, has a Class-I certification.
A nine-lane warm-up track has also been laid and the stadium, like its original plan, also has an 80-metre, six-lane track inside the stadium.
Gill praised the “safety record” achieved at the stadium during some of the most hazardous phases of construction of the roof.
‘Piece of art'
Ms. Dikshit described it as a “piece of art”. She said Gill had worked like an “engine” in getting the work completed against all odds.
Kalmadi, as had been his habit during the past few weeks, could not stop repeating the words “world class, world class”.
Kalmadi and the Delhi Chief Minister took pains to drive home their view that the media was only engaged in projecting the negative aspects associated with the preparations for the Games.
In a city, dug up all around because of the construction and beautification activities, not to speak of the hurdles caused because of the Metro project, the monsoons have brought further misery to the residents by way of flooding, slush and traffic jams. It has also exposed flaws in stadia and posed a question mark over Delhi's readiness to host the Games.
Acerbic retort
Keeping that in perspective, the reported remark of the former Sports Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, on Tuesday, about the Games drew an acerbic retort from Kalmadi.
“I was told that Mani Shankar Aiyar had said that he will be unhappy if the Games are a success. Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar, no body can spoil the Commonwealth Games,” said Kalmadi.
He said that had Aiyar continued as the Sports Minister he would not have seen the stadia get completed. Kalmadi praised Gill for completing the infrastructure facilities.
Short of expectations
The remodelled Nehru Stadium falls short of expectations in many respects. Quite tasteless is the colour scheme of blue, a lighter shade of dark blue for the lower tier and a lighter shade of blue and a murky blue for the upper tiers.
For such a large stadium, a tastefully-arranged set of contrasting colours, like the one they have at the tennis stadium, could have helped break the tedium as well as helped spectators, officials and coaches identify separate blocks.
The mammoth floodlight towers are no longer there. Instead the stadium has 22 smaller structures to hold the bulbs, 12 on each pole. The lighting will provide 2200 lux, enough for high definition television transmission.
