NEW DELHI, 7 March 2008 — Four years after winning the right to host the 2010 Commonwealth Games, India is still struggling to complete preparations for the mega event. Each passing day brings a new impediment to Delhi hosting the prestigious event, the latest being the outbreak of meningitis.
Nine workers at the construction site of the games village have caught the deadly disease affecting the nervous system, confirmed V.R. Sood, medical superintendent of Bimla Devi Hospital in East Delhi. “We received all the cases within the last 20 to 25 days. The situation is serious because all the nine construction workers from the games village were diagnosed with meningitis.”
Equally alarming is the fact that meningitis appears to have suddenly struck after a long gap. “We have not received any other patient of meningitis in the last five years,” Sood said.
The disease starts with fever, headache and body pain and eventually affects the brain. “When it affects the brain, the condition is termed serious. We found all our patients are serious,” he said.
There have not been any reports of any death so far from the disease.
The disease has, however, struck panic among workers at the construction site, who want to work elsewhere or return home. The majority of workers are from Bihar, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.
According to some media reports lack of adequate sanitation and personal hygiene among the 2,000 construction workers at the site may have led to the disease. Aside from distributing antibiotics among the workers, the developers have launched a cleanliness drive.
But the disease has certainly further delayed the construction work, which is already behind schedule.
The outbreak of the disease comes after environmentalists and activists opposed the construction of the games village on floodplains of the Yamuna River, the authorities may have to think again on what should be the site. The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) has planned the construction of 1,160 flats in the games village to accommodate the athletes. Environmentalists view this as a recipe for disaster.
“The Yamuna riverbed is a fragile eco-sensitive zone. Any concretization on the riverbed is a recipe for future ecological disaster. The government knows the problem, but it is still going ahead with the project,” noted urban planner A.G.K. Mennon said.
With the riverbed on Zone Four, which is prone to earthquakes, any additional concretization there can spell disaster. “By constructing the Commonwealth Games Village on Yamuna floodplains, the Delhi government is causing destruction in the name of construction,” according to Rajendra Singh, activist and Ramon Magsaysay award winner.
Trouble for the games’ planners does not end there. The city has not yet done much to clear its air. A recent assessment of air pollution made by the Center for Science and Environment has found that levels of particulate matter less than 2.5 micron size met the national benchmark on 111 of the 307 days monitored in 2007. Levels of nitrogen dioxide fared worse, meeting the national benchmark on just 95 of the total 330 days monitored the same year. Delhi has been listed as the 24th dirtiest city in the world by a study of American magazine Forbes. “Garbage and sewage flow freely, creating a rich environment for the growth of water-borne diseases contributing to extremely high rates of infant mortality,” the report states.
To cap it all, Tourism and Culture Minister Ambika Soni says Delhi remains short of 30,000 hotel rooms. Planning is still under way for identifying the needed hotel sites for the purpose.
