Jamtha: the fans' stadium

There's something about Jamtha. It actually used to be a village just outside Nagpur but is now best known for its cricket stadium that can easily claim to be among the top three in India. When an outsider first arrives, Jamtha's inconvenient distance from the city itself suddenly shrinks into relative unimportance.

The 1996 World Cup first gave to India the Punjab CA Stadium in Mohali, where for the first time Indian crowds were not packed in behind high metal fences as if they were in a cage. Mohali was open, generous and kept out pitch invaders with a moat. In 2011, Nagpur has set the standard that other grounds must follow. It is a compact bowl of a stadium that is built tightly around the field - and its moat has barbed wire - reaching its 45,000 capacity as its stands climb high. Yet the hallmark of this stadium is not its architecture or even what it gives to the cricketers, but the fact that its spectators have both been thought of and also included in the stadium's lineage.

Ticketholders can travel free to the ground from the city, which is 20km away, with the Vidarbha Cricket Association putting out 150 buses for the India v South Africa World Cup game. Spectators are allowed to carry in cameras and binoculars, given free water and have space to walk around the grounds. As they walk towards their stands, they see a message on the walls in English and Hindi which asks them to be on their best behaviour. The stadium, the notice says, is the recognised centre by the BCCI/ ICC and spectators are asked to “retain this recognition, it is in your hands”, and the notice then goes on to explain what that all means.

It may read slightly headmasterly but given that it takes little to turn plain partisanship into offensive jingoism, why not?

The VCA built the stadium outside the city because its old ground in the heart of Nagpur could not accommodate the floodlights that could make it a high-income earning venue for top flight one-day internationals. Jamtha was built, an official said, at the total cost of Rs 100 crores. That is extremely economical when you consider the cost of some of India’s big-city stadiums, even after doubling the cost of cement, bricks, tiles and what not in the bigger cities. Rebuilding most of the Wankhede for the World Cup has cost the Mumbai Cricket Association Rs 250 crore. The renovation of New Delhi's Nehru Stadium for the Commonwealth Games has cost the taxpayers of India Rs 961 crores.

Now if the good people of Vidarbha can produce such a fine stadium at such a modest cost, then why has the province not produced more than a single international cricketer? BCCI president Shashank Manohar, who used to head the VCA until recently, said that was because the people of Nagpur and surrounding areas were, in his mind, “contented” folk.

“It is the way they are in any field of life; they are happy the way they are and in what they do. In cricket, that may be playing Ranji Trophy.” In the age of Twenty20, IPL contracts and surging small town ambition, that somehow cannot add up. There must be something about Jamtha. Maybe Vidarbha's next international cricketer will tell us what that is.