TEAM HERALD
sports@herald-goa.com
NEW DELHI: A Parliamentary Standing Committee has pulled up the Sports Authority of India (SAI) for its gender discrimination with girls in terms of the girl trainees and female coaches.
In its report tabled in Parliament early this week, the Committee headed by Goa’s Congress MP Francisco Sardinha regretted that there were only 4,227 girls among 14,120 youth undergoing training under SAI’s sports promotion schemes.
The SAI also has a massive shortage of coaches as it had only 1109 coaches, including 135 on contracts, as against the sanctioned strength of 1524. Noting that there were only 172 women coaches, the committee wondered whether there were any norms about the strength of the women coaches and laid stress on maintaining a gender balance.
The committee anguished at no marked improvement even after two years of its recommendation to adopt measures to encourage women participation in sports by earmarking separate funds under various heads and scheme for women sports persons and recruitment of women coaches to train them.
“The committee is disappointed with the sterotyped reply of department of sports that the SAI’s schemes are open to both boys and girls without any discrimination,” the report said, suggesting suitable incentive mechanism to improve the female participation in sports. It also flayed the SAI’s claim that no sports discipline was affected due to shortage of the coaches, noting that “performance of its trainees would have certainly been much better had there been full strength of the coaches.”
SAI’s performance, on which the government spends nearly Rs 300 crore a year, is mainly gauged from the medal tally of its trainees. During the last 29 years of its existence, SAI trainees have won 1449 medals in international events — 594 gold, 467 silver and 388 bronze. Noting that this works out to the average number of just 50 medals in international events annually, the committee said it was not impressed with such a performance and wished that SAI strive to achieve the best, given the resource constraints.
“Regrettably, there is no system of fixing medal targets to be won by SAI trainees in various events. This is necessary to review and evaluate its achievements,” the committee said. On the SAI’s long-term strategy to improve performance in 2020 Olympics, the committee asked SAI to study the methods followed by China and western countries in grooming sports persons and adopt such practices as may be suitable to our country.”
It also noted that no expert in the fields of sports medicine and anti-doping has been included in the general body or the governing body of SAI. Taking note of the candid admission by the Ministry of Youth and Sports about an acute shortage of qualified persons as sports physiotherapists, conditioning experts, sports nutritionists, sports psychologists and sports analysts who are an integral part of the coaching team of elite sports persons, the committee called for immediate measures to address the shortage of various sports specialists plaguing SAI.
