1,200 workers, 24×7 shifts, hundreds of crores: Rourkela set for hockey World Cup
When Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik laid the foundation stone for a new hockey stadium at Rourkela on February 16, 2021 — in the middle of a pandemic — and announced that it would be a second venue for the Men’s FIH Hockey World Cup, many, even within the government, were sceptical about its timely completion. So much so that the International Hockey Federation had to give the state a deadline of November 30 to complete the main structure and lay the turf.
For two years since then, over 1,200 migrant workers — many of them from Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal — worked round the clock in three shifts to construct the stadium. And less than three weeks before the first match, the grand saucer-shaped steel structure, with a seating capacity of around 21,000, stands tall over 16 acres of la...