Guyana is cricket mad. Think of it and the game and you think of West Indies Test greats such as Rohan Kanhai and Lance Gibbs, Clive Lloyd and Alvin Kallicharran, all Guyanans, in action on the historic Bourda ground in Georgetown.

Yet the Bourda will not be used when the World Cup is staged in the Caribbean in 2007, though.

Architecturally, the Bourda is a throwback to a bygone age of imperial elegance, its main stand as evocative and historic as the pavilion at Lord's.

But it has been deemed to be not good enough for the 21st century, and the impoverished government of Guyana has decided to build a 20,000-seat stadium out of town at Providence, at a cost of $25 million.

The foundations for the new ground have been laid, but there is already an international row brewing over how one of the world's poorest nations is to pay for the build and maintenance of the stadium.

Thus far, India has put the money up for the project - not the Indian cricketing authorities, even though their national team will be based in Guyana at least until the World Cup quarter-finals, but their government.

India's cricket team will will feel at home in Guyana. The majority of the population are originally of Indian heritage, President Bharrat Jagdeo is an Indo-Guyanese, as is the majority of his cabinet .It was President Jagdeo who negotiated the first deal with the government of India during a state visit in 2003.

India's then BJP government promised a $20 million loan on easy terms towards the building of the stadium. However, when the Congress Party won the Indian general election last May, there was a shift in policy.

Last month, Guyana signed for a $6 million loan from India's government, under the previous "soft" terms, plus a $19 million commercial loan from the Import Export Bank of India.

This latest loan agreement will not be paid off by Guyana until at least 2024, and all for a stadium that may hardly be used after the six World Cup games are played there.

But Guyana's indebtedness will not not end there. The stadium is designed by Indian architects and 85 per cent of the spend on the building work - due to start early in the New Year - will go to Indian companies, with only an estimated $8 million of the funding actually making its way into the local economy.

Yet the negotiations which set up the original loan deal with India seem set to more than double Guyana's stadium debt in what is a literal "sweetener", in which Indian businesses would benefit from preferntial deals for the modernisation two massive sugar factories, and all with the help of another $35 million loan.

The International Monetary Fund has now intervened. Guyana is rated to be a Highly Indebted Poor Country by the IMF, which in July reported on the country's economy thus: "Growth has remained weak, reflecting structural weaknesses and the difficult political situation. Accelerating the pace of poverty reduction remains an important challenge. Moreover, Guyana's debt burden remains high, even following debt relief under the HIPC Initiative".

The IMF says the stadium does not make long-term commercial sense and has in effect vetoed Guyana from any further borrowing for the stadium until a feasibility study has been conducted.

"The priority that the authorities have attached to.. a new stadium is a matter of concern," the IMF has said, adding that they "have serious doubts regarding the project's financial rate of return and the possibility that additional fiscal costs may result."

But despite this opposition the Guyanese and Indian governments have pledged to push on with the stadium project. One reason for the urgency might be the next general election, due in March 2006.

Guyana's political system is split almost entirely on racial lines, between Indo- and Afro-Caribbeans, and the country tends to forment inter-racial violence at election time. Previous England cricket tours to the South American state have been postponed or distrupted as a result of outbreaks of civil violence, including the bombing of a tour hotel the last time elections coincided with cricket.

Some fear that any prolonged disruption in Guyana in 2006 might prompt the International Cricket Council to cancel all matches planned for the new stadium in Providence and move the scheduled matches elsewhere. Which would make Guyana's new stadium possibly the most expensive folly even in the usually profligate world of international sport.

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