Sunday, November 25, 2001		Article

Too many cooks spoiling the sports broth
M.S.Unnikrishnan

THERE are too many cooks spoiling the sports broth, and the Sports Ministry is just one of them. Yet, the existence of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports cannot be wished away as the Sports Ministry plays a prominent role in the growth of sports in the country. A conscientious sports minister can indeed elevate the standard of sports in the country.

But often, the Sports Ministry (in fact, the Sports Minister), is at loggerheads with the Sports Federations and the State Governments. And the Indian Olympic Association (IOA). As a result, sports in the country has taken many a knockout blow.

The National Sports Policy 2001 intends to delegate powers in the hands of state governments and the sports federations, but with a rider,that the state governments and the sports federations would be made accountable to the money doled out to them by the ministry for organising national camps, sending teams abroad, and bringing in foreign coaches.

The creation of the Sports Authority of India (SAI) has lessened the burden of the Sports Ministry in so many ways. But the SAI is such a drain on the resources of the Government that it is even called the "white elephant" of Indian sports.

That, of course, is an unfair comparison, as SAI has often justified its role of being the watchdog of Indian sports, once played by the All-India Council of Sports (AICS).

The AICS was, in effect, a toothless body, which used to be headed by either retired Army officers or politicians. Since there was no Sports Ministry in place then (the Union Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports came into being after the creation of the Human Resources Development Ministry) somebody had to shoulder the burden, and the AICS was formed to fill the vacancy.

But the people who headed the AICS proved to be unequal to the task entrusted to them, and the Central Government had to disband it and create a separate Sports Ministry. Because sports was getting global importance as a medium of creating a healthy, peaceful and prosperous society.

The Sports Ministry works in tandem with the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) and the sports federations. Still, sports is not getting the priority it should be getting. The existence of the Sports Ministry is a vital necessity to keep checks and balances on the activities of the sports federations, who accept government grants with glee, and then forgets about their responsibilites.

There are some sports federations headed by politicians with a lot of clout, who are the worst offenders. Such federations have not been able to generate enough funds to sustain their activities.

They solely depend on Government grants to fund their functions, but in the first available opportunity, they would be the first ones to take the "Government to task for its misdemeanour and ineptitude".

The Sports Ministry wants to stop this duplicity of the State Sports Ministries and the various sports federations, and make them accountable for their actions.

The Punjab Government has done no credit to sports by postponing the National Games several times. The Central Government released the promised gramts on time, yet the State Government failed to fulfil its own commitments on time. As a result, the National Games got postponed, over and again.

It’s unfair to blame the Union Government for the bottlenecks created on the National Games front. Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, when he was the Sports Minister, went out of his way to accommodate the demands of the state government.

Yet, Punjab, a state well-known for its generous sporting ethos, has unfotunately, failed to discharge its responsibilities with a sense of urgency and responsibility. The National Games in Punjab would not have become a reality were it not been for the postponement of the Afro-Asian Games, which were scheduled to be held in November. The games have been postponed indefinitely, thanks to the US military action in Afghanistan.

Early burnouts the bane of Indian sports

THE country has lost many promising youngsters to sport-related injuries and may lose some more in the future with sports medicine being a low priority field in the present hierachy and sportsmen simply being denied the required sports accessories to prevent injuries or proper rehabilitation facilities.

There are examples galore. Sunita Rani who is battling injury cutting short a potential bright career, Rachita Mistry, who is presently battling injury and even Jyoti Sikdar who could have run for some time more.

The seriousness towards sports medicine can be gauged from the fact that the Sports Authority of India (SAI) has only nine doctors working on a full time basis with it. Furthermore, doctors trained by it are only used by the Services team and sports medicine specialists are missing in state training programmes.

It is the same story as far as providing equipment to sportpersons is concerned. Except for national level athletes most of the youngsters have to train in ordinary shoes which causes them orthopedic problems later on in their careers. NIS Senior Scientific Officer, Ashok Ahuja, said many athletes suffered burn out problems due to lack of proper gear, including training shoes, adding a facility like a foot scanner, which was the norm abroad, was not available in India. According to Ahuja, similarly other sportsmen, including boxers, and football players had to make do with sub-standard equipment which caused injuries.

Other problems for sportsmen include injudicious use of drugs which Dr Ahuja said had reached alarming proportions. He said sportspersons were, on many occasions, being treated wrongly due to lack of knowledge of sports-related injuries. He said as many as 98 per cent of injuries were those related to the soft tissues and did not require intervention. ‘’ A muscle pull is like a heart attack for a sportsman and he has to be given treatment for it with the same seriousness if he has to be rehabilitated quickly’’, he added.

Unfortunately on many occasions, sportsmen were being given drugs or pain killers were being injected into them for immediate relief which however proved costly in the long run. This was not all. There was a lack of proper rehabilitation methods to tackle injuries and every training procedure had to be incorporated with a recovery method.

Talking to a number of sportsmen, it was revealed that use of steroids to tackle sport injuries had spelt the death-knell of many a career. Though proper facilities are available for national level players, the same is not the case for budding athletes who use steroids indiscriminately to tackle injuries which have serious consequences later on. Making adequate sports medicine facilities available to the budding players alone could tackle this problem and prevent early burnouts which were retarding their growth.

— J.S.