By nightfall, the enclave was nowhere to be seen. The plastic-roofed shanties that are home to more than 200 people — laborers who have spent the last year fixing up the city's roads for the games — had disappeared behind the smiling tiger.

While poverty remains one of India's most intractable and enduring problems, officials have tried to ensure it is not what games visitors remember. Many of this city's beggars have been arrested or forced from the streets, migrants have been rousted, and thousands of homes have been hidden from sight.

New Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, the equivalent of the city's mayor, denied that the banners, hundreds of which have been put up around the city in the past couple days, had anything to do with disguising poverty. Even if many were placed in front of slums.

“It's to give the city a festive look,” she told reporters Monday.

But the message was clear to Chaitran Rahu, one of the migrant laborers whose home was hidden last week by the 10—foot (3—meter) tall banners, which are made of thick plastic and mounted on metal and bamboo frames.

“They know that we're laborers and we're dirty and they don't want anyone to see us from the road,” he said, growing increasingly angry as he spoke. “We work for the government but they still treat us like garbage,” he said — using a far stronger word than “garbage.” He makes about $2.75 a day shoveling tar, working on a road gang for a subcontractor. If that seems like miserable pay, it puts him well ahead of more than 800 million Indians who, according to World Bank estimates, survive on less than $2 a day.

The Commonwealth Games is an Olympic style competition held every four years that brings together nearly 7,000 athletes and officials from 71 countries and territories.

India wanted the games to help showcase its reputation as a growing economic power — and help it shed its old cliches of poverty and illiteracy. Instead, its image has been battered by its chaotic last-minute efforts to get ready for an event it was supposed to begin preparing for in 2003.

Days before the Oct. 3 opening ceremony, organizers were facing criticism over everything from the filthy state of some rooms in the athletes' village to questionable construction to security worries and snakes reportedly found in the athletes' village.

As for poverty, officials seem to want no one to ask at all.

Officials launched a drive against beggars, slum neighborhoods and the homeless earlier in 2010 that was so aggressive — demolishing thousands of slum homes and arresting or displacing thousands of people, rights group say — that the courts finally stepped in to stop them.

“You cannot just take bulldozers anywhere and demolish anyone's house in the name of the Commonwealth Games,” a New Delhi court said after city officials tore down a series of homeless shelters and shanty towns. “We think you want to show the foreigners coming for the Commonwealth Games that there are no poor people in India.” New Delhi, of course, is not the first city to try to hide its rougher edges. The Chinese government tore town and rebuilt large parts of Beijing in the years before the 2008 Olympics, demolishing entire blocks of housing and forcing thousands of residents to move.

But Indian officials like to point out that they govern the world's most populous democracy — unlike China, its main regional competitor for economic power — and that the needs of normal people need to be taken into account.

But the common man is getting little from these games.

Just ask him.

“The government is just trying to hide its ineptitude,” said a now homeless man named Ilyas, a civil servant who said he'd moved to New Delhi a month ago after a bitter family feud and a battle with depression. He had been living on the streets, near a mosque where free food is regularly distributed. But now he's hiding in a city park and sleeping in the bushes. “The police tell us to get off the streets, so we come back here.” P. Sainath, an Indian journalist who often writes about India's growing economic divide, said he was not surprised by the government's actions.

“All this captures the elite of India very well,” he said, referring to the government's proud recitations of its booming economic growth and increasing consumerist culture. “India is not really about 'Slumdog Millionaire.' It's about slumdogs versus millionaires, and that's what you're seeing in Delhi now.” But on Monday, on a New Delhi street corner, some things continued as they have for years.

New Delhi is believed to have about 60,000 beggars. Many are handicapped. Nearly all are from India's poor northern states. If begging is ubiquitous in many parts of the city, it remains officially illegal and the least lucky beggars are convicted in all-but-forgotten special courts and then trucked out of town to rundown facilities that are often little better than prisons.

While most beggars have been chased off the streets in recent weeks by police — and at least some driven from town — a team of young girls were working cars stopped at a traffic light near the city center. One was performing second rate gymnastics while the other held out a bowl for donations.

The older one, who was about 13 and who identified herself only as Seema, said they regularly had to dodge the authorities these days.

“The police say the Olympics are coming, and we have to stay away and come back in one month.”