New Delhi, Aug 03: They can be found in every city and town, rotting silently, occasionally tarted up by a lick of paint when the need arises, decked up for a night out. They are India’s best stadiums, built over the years for crores of rupees, used as political tools, inaugurated with great fanfare and then left to their own devices. Prompted by a story in this paper about Nehru Stadium, the country’s showpiece arena, not having enough water for the Indian women’s hockey team, The Sunday Express went to six stadiums across the country. What came out was a story of neglect whose only redeeming feature was its democratic nature: It cut across all sport. The neo-Soviet monolith of New Delhi’s Nehru Stadium is slowly stumbling toward the same fate as the former Red Empire. In Pune, Suresh Kalmadi’s Balewadi complex boasts a massive electronic scoreboard that hasn’t worked since its inaugural fortnight.

Cricket, reputedly the most-watched sport in this country, isn’t much kinder to its theatres. Sardar Patel Stadium in Ahmedabad and Chandigarh’s Sector 16 were both once flourishing nurseries of cricket, the latter spawning Kapil Dev. Today, they both languish in the shadow of the new kids on the block, Motera and Mohali, respectively.
Meanwhile, full faith has been placed in the power of cosmetic restoration. A little trimming of the grass, a splash of whitewash on the walls, disinfectant in the loos and, for the duration of a one-day international, or even a Test match, the crumbling mass of Kanpur’s Green Park stadium can appear spanking new. It’s like so many other facets of Indian life; if it’s broke, fix it so it works today, we’ll worry later about tomorrow. And the fear of what could happen to the stadiums has never affected the planning of Indian sports administrators. There’s a whole city of stadiums built in Hyderabad which were used for the National Games last year and will be used again for the Afro-Asian Games in October. After that, it’s anybody’s guess when they will next be used.
At the root of all this, of course, is the fact that we don’t have a sporting culture. If we did, the stadiums would be used more regularly, people would be held accountable and the stands of Green Park wouldn’t be overgrown with vegetation.