Free education and govt job for 100 sports kids in each district across India

The credibility of cricket may be down but the best 100 young sportspersons in each district of India will get an assured government job. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 26, 2013, 01:53:28 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The credibility of cricket may be down but the best 100 young sportspersons in each district of India will get an assured government job.

This is part of the new plan of the sports ministry. Named the Identification and Nurturing Sports Talent (INSTAL), the plan is to set up a special school in every district of the country to provide training and guidance to young and budding sports children.

The scheme, which would cost around Rs 11,000 crore in the 12th five-year-plan (2012-17), is part of the Prime Minister’s plan to increase India’s haul in 2020 Olympics.

Sports minister Jitendra Singh on Saturday unveiled the plan at a meeting of sports ministers and said a major incentive under the scheme would be an assured government job to those budding sportsperson at an appropriate age. Both Centre and state governments have schemes assuring jobs to sportspersons doing well at national and international levels.

Most of the money being sought under the scheme would be utilized for setting up a sports school with conventional educational facilities in each district with the help of the education department of the state. The government officials said the curriculum for these schools would be different catering to overall sporting activity.

The government will utilise funds under another scheme called Panchayat Yuva Krida Aur Khel Abhiyan to identify young sportsperson, thereby bringing synergy in the two schemes.

“Hundred talented young boys and girls in the 6-10 age group will be selected through rural sports competition and will be admitted in district level schools with facilities of boarding, lodging, special diet and sports kit,” the minister said. The government will bear all the expenses of these students and most-promising of them would also get a stipend.

The best of these children would get specialised training at 25 centres of excellence to be set up across India by the Sports Authority of India. The minister requested the state governments to provide free land and development infrastructure for these centres in a bid to have a collaborative effort in promoting non-cricket sports, which has lagged behind because of public fund constraints.

The ministry expects to get approval of the Planning Commission for this scheme soon and expects to roll it out in select districts from the current financial year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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