The dirty conditions have prompted several teams to delay their arrival into New Delhi, with only eight days before the Oct. 3 opening ceremony. If the situation has been embarrassing, it mostly reflected the abysmal management that has plagued the Games; some laborers had used the rooms during construction, and housekeepers had failed to clean up on time.

Anyone living in India is inevitably confronted by squalor, whether the slums and shantytowns that exist in most cities or the beggars, often children, who tap on car windows for change. Few Indians would argue that poverty is not a paramount national concern, and many domestic critics of the games argued that the country was still too poor to spend so much money on what is effectively a government prestige event.

Mr. Bhanot’s comments hit a raw nerve because many middle class Indians make a distinction between public and private standards. If public bathrooms in government buildings are usually dirty, private homes are usually immaculate. Most people pay close attention to their appearance and cleanliness, even as public roads are usually potholed and public buildings are often not well maintained.

“It’s not that somehow people don’t recognize the truth that there is a problem about public standards of hygiene in India,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. “But usually we have dealt with it by confining it to the public space. We think private standards are very high. And he seemed to be questioning that.”

Foreigners visiting India invariably run into the chaotic, often dirty public sphere throbbing outside their hotels, coloring their impressions of the country. Keshav R. Murugesh, chief executive of WNS Global Services, a Mumbai outsourcing company, said Indian companies needed to work hard to persuade international customers that Indians could do complicated work in a timely and exacting manner.

Mr. Murugesh worried that clients, having seen the controversy over the athletes’ village, would now wonder: “Is that how I’m being served?” He jokingly added: “I just wish they had outsourced it to us.”