FIFA World Cup 2022: Shahid Ali, the Indian engineer who helped build the stadium that will host final

The quadrennial football world cup, being hosted by Qatar, has been shrouded in controversy since day 1. Even as the world's largest sporting event is underway, the allegation of deplorable working conditions of migrant workers, to bring up the world-class stadiums, hangs on the back of the host nation.

Among those hands that contributed to the stadiums seen today, are a pair of Indian hands. Shahid Ali, a project engineer hailing from Maharashtra's Nagpur.

In an interview with Asia News International (ANI), Shahid shed light on the kind of work he undertook with fellow engineers to come up with the stadiums across the country.

'It is a proud feeling that I was a part of the construction team of the stadium. I don't have words to describe how incredible I feel having been part of the team that built those stadiums,' Shahid said, sat in his house, the FIFA World Cup opening ceremony playing on the TV behind him.

Indians constituted a major part of the team behind Qatar's world cup preparation, 'There were Indians from the ground level to top management in Qatar,' Shahid adds.

The engineer says that there were people from more than 35 countries including China, UK, and Australia who were working with them.

Shahid went to Qatar in 2017 when construction work began on the stadiums. He says that only for two months in the year there is a dip in temperatures, that too only at night.

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'It used to be very hot, making it difficult for us to work so we worked our way around the extreme conditions,' he says adding that the construction workers were given adequate breaks at regular intervals of 20 minutes to rest and rejuvenate.

'We installed coolers at construction sites to battle the heat and at every 15 metres, dispensers filled with glucose water were kept to avoid dehydration or other ailments of workers,' explains Shahid.

Shahid then goes on to sift through his laptop, showing photos of 'moist fans' placed across the then under-construction stadium to aid in reducing temperatures, 'At least 50-100 of these fans were kept all across the construction site.'

Heaping praises on the facilities provided by the country, the engineer says, 'Even for the most minor injuries, we had a doctor, a nurse and ambulance present on site to tend to us.' This, he adds, is how Qatar worked at countering the extreme hot temperatures.

Addressing a question on the allegations that working conditions of migrant workers were not up to the mark, Shahid says, 'In the 3 years that I worked there, I never noticed anything like that. Rather, the facilities provided for the labourers were so good that they could simply go and put forth all their grievances to the world cup authorities.'

Safety measures that were in place, Shahid says, were a notch higher than the safety measures that are there at oil and gas sites. Refuting the allegations, Shahid says that barring the weather, the working conditions were good and met safety standards to the fullest.

'It was a world-class experience with a world-class team.' concludes Shahid Ali.