New Delhi: A parliamentary standing committee of the HRD ministry has recommended residential sports schools, stressing that sports persons can't be deprived of basic education.
It also expressed concern over the 36 per cent vacancy for sports coaches and suggested the involvement of the private sector to propagate the culture of sports. It wanted to involve private and corporate sectors to mobilise resources for the creation of sports infrastructure and suggested the utilisation of private sports academies to train 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 the replication of the PPP model of Odisha, where the state government and the corporate sector joined hands to fund 10 high performance centres for badminton and shooting.
It asked the Department of Sports to fill up vacant posts for coaches, expressing concern over the 544 posts lying vacant, accounting for 36 per cent of the total sanctioned 1524 positions. It called for importing basic education to identified sports talents as the promotion of sports is not feasible in isolation, noting that 893 sports persons, accounting for 59 per cent of the total 1518 sports persons, selected in 2018 for further training refused to join training institutions due to the lack of integrated education facilities available at such centres.
The panel noted that much of the success of the country's sports persons at an international level from 2018 to 2019 was mostly due to the individual efforts of the players and private coaching despite various proactive policies of the department of sports.
It, therefore, urged the department to organize international sporting events to showcase and popularize games, such as Kalaripayattu, Mallakhamb, and Kho-Kho, which are a source of many modern day sports.
