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NEW DELHI: A Parliamentary standing committee of HRD ministry has recommended residential sports schools, stressing that the sports persons can’t be deprived of basic education.
It also expressed concern over 36% vacant posts of the sports coaches and suggested involvement of the private sector to propagate the culture of sports. It wanted involvement of private and corporate ectors to mobilise resources for creation of the sports infrastructure and suggested to utilise the private sports academies to train the sports persons, making use of their reputed coaches.
In its report on implementation of the “Khelo India” scheme launched by the NDA government in its previous tenure, the 31-member committee headed by BJP MP Satyanarayana Jatiya from Madhya Pradesh recommended replication of the PPP model of Odisha in which the state government and corporate sector joined hands to fund 10 high performance centres for badminton and shooting.
It asked the Department of Sports to fill up the vacant posts of the coaches, expressing serious concern over 544 posts lying vacant that accounted for 36% of the total sanctioned 1524 positions.
It called for importing basic education to the identified sports talents as promotion of sports is not feasible in isolation, noting that 893 sports persons account for 59% of the total 1518 selected in 2018 for further training refused to join the training institutions due to lack of integrated education facilities available at such centres.
The panel noted that much of the success of the country’s sports persons at the international level during 2018-19 was mostly due to the individual efforts of the players and private coaching despite various proactive policies of the department of sports.
The committee therefore, urged the department to organize international sporting events to showcase and popularize the games like Kalaripayattu, Mallakhamb, Kho-Kho etc. which are source of many modern day sports.
