Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the privileged few' Yet, 26 years later, India had learned no lessons and the Gandhis stayed
away - though, ultimately, the games went well and India won 38 gold medals, coming
Multiple accusations of corruption and extortion led to court cases against officials led
by Kalmadi, a flamboyant, wealthy and well-connected politician in the Congress party.
He had made a career out of heading sports administrative bodies, including the Indian
Olympic Association, and was the chairman of the games' organizing committee. He was
booed at the opening ceremony because he was seen as the leader of all that had gone
wrong. The boos reflected the pent-up anger and frustration of Delhi-ites who saw this
blustering responsibility-dodging part-time politician as the focal point for failures that had
2011. He was then released on bail and was, unsurprisingly, rehabilitated into some activ-
ities of the Congress party though he was no longer socially acceptable. In February 2013,
he was put on trial along with nine others on charges linked to a Swiss firm's contract for
the games' timing, scoring and results system, but there was no sign of action against many
others in the Delhi government and elsewhere who were suspected of involvement in cor-
rupt deals.
The other major breakdown of infrastructure occurred when the national power grid
failed in July 2012. It was overloaded by at least three states drawing more than their au-
thorized share of electricity. A few days earlier, there had been a similar shutdown affecting
a quarter of the population. About one-third of the 174 gigawatts of electricity generated
in India annually is either stolen or lost in the conductors and transmission equipment that
form the country's distribution grid, contributing, along with slow project development, to
and expensively, with power generated by large private power plants in factories and port-
able generators in individual homes and shops.
On the same night as the biggest black-out, a fire on an express train killed 32 people.
occurrences, these infrastructure failures stemmed from the country's generally laid-back
approach to tackling and curing problems, in the hope that they would go away. In both
cases, there was a lack of focused political management. The railway minister at the time
was Mukul Roy, a minor politician from West Bengal, who spent most of his time in the
state, doing the bidding of his political boss, Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister, who her-
self had earlier been an absentee railways minister. Like Banerjee, Mukul rarely visited his
railways ministry office in Delhi.
Sushilkumar Shinde, who had been minister of power for three years, was not wholly
responsible for the grid failures because power supplies are managed by individual states.
He should, however, have put more effort into tackling India's overall energy crisis, which
