Beijing hosted pluperfect Olympics. The facilities were perfect; the hospitality was perfect, even the lip-synching was perfect. The smog was scrubbed out and the downsides of totalitarianism obscured by the perfectly groomed and charmingly polite face that young China presented. There was also the small matter of 51 gold medals.
In order to play the perfect host, the Chinese spent around $40 billion on beefing up the infrastructure of Beijing, building new metro lines, a new airport terminal, the athletes’ village and sundry sporting venues. The costs incurred during the event itself when an extra 2 million people swung into Beijing added up to another $4 billion-odd.
In addition, enormous sums were spent relocating large numbers of people. According to official estimates, around 6,000 people were moved out of key areas. Unofficial accounts suggest over 1 million people were ejected from back-alley mazes, which were then redeveloped according to masterplan. In addition, the state spent untold billions on the multiple athletics and sports programmes that earned it all those medals.
The PRC’s ruling apparatchiks may well consider all of it money well-spent. The infrastructure will be instantly absorbed into the daily life of Beijing. The sporting successes and the stunning impact of the perfectly-scripted 2008 Olympics have undoubtedly created a feel-good factor for the PRC.
It is a relatively certain way to keep the local populace happy. The Indian government will spend about $4 billion next year on the General Elections — about as much as China spent on the Olympics. I doubt that there will be much feel-good going around when that exercise ends.
No Indian government now, or in the foreseeable future, will spend money on relocating a million people out of a metro in order to hold a sporting event. In a democracy, politicians are painfully aware that acquiring 400 acres of land in Bengal, or relinquishing 100 uninhabited acres in Kashmir, is enough to cause lasting grief.
India is planning to spend about $200 billion over the next five years to bolster the infrastructure across the entire country. China spent a fifth of that amount in two years, on a single city.
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India will, however, spend about $4 billion on its space programme over the next 12 years or more, as it tries to build space-stations circa 2014 and then targets a manned moon landing in 2020. While there are critics who believe reinventing the rocket is no more sensible than reinventing the wheel, it’s easy to disagree with that opinion.
Completing a successful space programme would give India’s currently immature military-industrial complex and its scientific establishment a grip on an entire new range of technologies. That is bound to have unintentionally positive outcomes just as the original space programmes did.
Unlike winning multiple gold medals, a space programme is well within India’s capabilities. It requires large numbers of personnel to be trained to be, say, 99th percentile, in terms of scientific knowledge and skills. That is something Indian institutes of higher learning can manage reasonably well, going by their track record.
For that matter, India’s sporting establishment with all its flaws is good enough to achieve 99.999999 percentile, which is where you need to be to make Olympic qualifying marks, as so many Indian sportspersons do. But it requires astronomically larger per capita spends to grab Olympic golds.
The resources required to win multiple golds can be allocated in a single-party state. A multi-party state is better served trying to put men on the moon and being satisfied with a single gold. One is a vanity project, the other is not.