Commonwealth Games 2010: Collateral Damage

As he was waiting along with about 100 job aspirants at a large information technology services company, 26-year-old Neeraj Gupta heard a company official call out for those who had worked with the Organising Committee (OC) of the Delhi Commonwealth Games (CWG) to step aside.

“There were about 10 of us. We thought we were going to get preferential treatment,’’ recalls Gupta. But what came was a shock. The official told them bluntly that the company would not hire them because they had worked in the OC.

Gupta left it as a one-off incident, but little did he realise that it would become a pattern. A few weeks later, he was selected as an IT manager at a mid-level firm and the human resources department even discussed his salary. However, the next day, a vice president of the company told him that they would not hire him because of his stint at the Games.

Several companies are refusing to entertain job-seekers who worked with the CWG OC. The corruption taint that has now smeared some of the top officials of the OC has percolated down to the junior most project officer.

Many youngsters, some of them straight out of college, had joined the OC, looking at it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in a mega project and proudly display the experience on their CVs. It, however, appears the experience certificate is more likely to shut doors for them.

“One company said that they would not consider it as work experience but just an adventure,” says Pradeep Kumar, a graduate from Delhi College of Engineering who got the OC job as part of campus placements.

Several youngsters who worked at the OC told Forbes India that they have faced difficulties in getting jobs because of their CWG assignment. While a few of them have been unambiguously told by prospective employers that they would not risk hiring people from the OC, others were given subtler hints. Many of them have landed jobs, though not always of their choice, but some are still searching.

Technology was defined as one of the key functional areas of the OC with a budget of over Rs. 320 crore and the division was responsible for the entire information and communication systems and services at all the venues and the Games Village. The one-line task description does not capture the enormity of the job that was made near impossible by the inordinate delays in awarding contracts and completion of civil works. Gagan Singh, the venue manager for Jawaharlal Nehru (JLN) stadium, where all the main athletics events were held, says that the technology operation plan was ready several months in advance. “The cable trays had to be laid but the civil work was not over,” he says. The trays had to be laid and then the cabling done; about 350 km of cables.

“What many people do not realise is that the team had to work doubly hard to get things ready on time. The Games went off smoothly. It was an operational success,” says Harsh Kumar, OC’s joint director general for technology. Harsh Kumar, who is on deputation from the Railways, says he had a team of 160 people who practically worked round the clock towards the end to get things ready. Sometimes new additions were required at the last moment.

For instance, days before the Games were to begin, the OC’s media advisor told Harsh Kumar that, come what may, they should set up a fast Internet connection for the media. “It doesn’t matter how well you conduct the Games. If the media centre is not first-rate, you will get bad press,” he warned. Harsh Kumar decided to set up a dedicated high-speed network where media persons could plug in their own computers at the venues. “We had to create a new network and it had to be de-linked from the Games Data Network and Security Data Network to isolate it in case of a problem,” says Harsh Kumar. It became operational in the nick of time.

“The opening ceremony was to begin in the evening. In the morning, we were still testing the high-speed Internet,” says Gagan Singh.

Singh, a young computer engineer from BITS Pilani’s Goa campus, counts that the athletics venue alone had about 550 CCTV cameras, 240 computers, 80 office printers and photocopiers and 80 flap barriers. He had a team of four managing and co-ordinating the work of 32 volunteers and 80 staff of different vendors laying cables, fixing network switches, office automation machines, cameras and computers.

Singh, who passed up a campus placement with Oracle to work at the OC, has given five interviews, three at IT firms and two at business schools. At every interview he was asked if he was involved in corruption. “They make a joke of asking you whether you were involved,” he says. “But you get the distinct impression that it is not all jokes.” Singh says the enormous experience that he gained is never considered.

One of the skills they learnt was managing crises, which were routine at the venues. With many agencies rushing to finish their work, chaos was the rule rather than the exception. It often ruined completed work.

A few days before the Games began, about 20 network cables were ripped up by a bulldozer that was levelling the ground at the Games Village. “We had got those cables laid over several months and all of it was ruined. It took us three sleepless nights to fix them,” says Pradeep Kumar who was working at the Village and handling the logistics of assigning 605 desktop computers, 200 to visiting countries, 200 for OC work and the rest in the Internet café.

Sometimes they had to overcome attempts of sabotage. A day before the Games began, someone cut the wires behind a network switch. It took several hours to manually trace the breach and fix it. It was cut again the next day. “We finally had to post a policeman in that room,” says Harsh Kumar. He laments that the amount of work that the team put in went unnoticed in the media storm created by allegations of widespread corruption and mismanagement against the top few officials. “The point is that rest of the team had to work day and night to make it happen.”

Another project officer, Iqbal Khan, says nobody understands how tough it was for them to co-ordinate and manage the work with multiple contractors and vendors working at the same place. “The industry thinks that we are so young that we could not have done this job,” says Khan.

Even though many firms are ignoring their work, almost everyone has finished up with plenty of experience in project management and crisis resolution. One assistant project officer says that no company would have given her managerial responsibility with her technical qualification. “It was a really good experience,” she says. The experience, however, turned sour at a later job interview from which she walked out in tears after facing uncomfortable questions.  

(Most names have been changed to protect identities.)