Utter chaos gripped the Sardar Patel Planetarium -- the venue of the contest -- this afternoon, climaxing with an announcement, ``As we (the VMC) cannot handle the situation, the programme is being postponed. The new date will be advertised in newspapers.''

This bit of information, too, came more than an hour after the parents and their children had assembled at the venue.

But in a way, it put an end to the agony that began almost as soon as the contestants assembled at 4 p.m. There were too few registration counters to handle the rush of children of various age groups, to begin with. Avni Bhatt, whose child was an eager contestant, showed Express Newsline a chit of paper mentioning the child's weight and height. ``Is this any way to handle the show?'' she asked.

A section of parents even alleged that the weighing scales were in such a bad condition that they had collapsed, bruising some children.

``Our children were weighed like brinjals and potatoes. They should at least take the IQ into consideration while judging the healthy baby,'' said Bhatt.

Bharat Saralia and Priti Modi, both parents, said the VMC should learn a lesson or two from competitions organised by private bodies.

The 20 representatives of the Vadodara Municipal Corporation's Integrated Community Development Scheme, a couple of doctors and the public relations staff proved to be grossly inadequate when it came to handling the 1,000-odd contestants of the competition organised on a State Government directive to mark 50 years of Independence.

``Why couldn't the VMC anticipate that at least 1,000 children would turn up from a city of 14 lakh'', questioned a parent. They had all come in response to VMC newspaper advertisements inviting parents of children in the 1-3 and 3-6 age groups to participate in the contest.

``We waited for three hours in this searing heat'', complained Smita Baxi, while Bansilal Mehta and Madhukar Trivedi, referring to the organisational failure, expressed scepticism about the VMC's ability to run the city.

Nimisha Shah, a parent, reportedly lost her purse in the chaos. Many others demanded compensation for the time lost.

Confessing that they had not expected such a large number of entries, Kavita Desai of the ICDS said the staff was inadequate to handle such a large number of children in a programme organised at ``short notice''.

Assistant Municipal Commissioner, in-charge of the Public Relations Department, F A Saiyed, tried to pass the buck on to the ICDS. He said the programme would now be spread over a couple of days.