Special sports stars from Pehal lead by example

Neha Saini

Tribune news service

Amritsar, March 26

Pehal Resource Centre’s sports programme for the disabled has received a big push over the years, thanks to its students, who have been consistently getting medals at national and international sporting events.

This year, three of its special athletes returned with medals from the Special Olympics World Summer Games held in Abu Dhabi.

Launched in 2013, the government-run Pehal Resource Centre had initially started with games, such as handball and floor hockey for its students with disabilities.

“The aim is to hone the talent of these children in sports, along with training them in life skills. The centre’s primary focus is to educate these students, along with others under the Sarv Shiksha programme. But our special athletes have performed tremendously over the years at World Special Olympics, giving us the required boost to expand our programme,” said Dharminder Singh Gill, coordinator of the resource centre.

The centre trains more than 70 students with disabilities in different sports, including unified games. 

It has also formed a cricket team comprising of visually challenged students, which will be the first under Punjab’s Sarv Shisha Abhiyan. 

“The team will be trained from the April session and all sporting infrastructure will be provided by a Pune-based NGO. We also have a team of professional coaches, including qualified coaches for disabled athletes, who train our students,” said Gill. 

He said that the success of their programme and athletes had also motivated the parents of disabled students, who are now willingly getting them trained in various sports. This year, Pehal winners include brothers Udayvir Singh and Jasbir Singh, who suffer from intellectual disability and have won bronze in cycling and silver in basketball, respectively. 

Another student Gurjant Singh has won a gold medal in handball in unified category. Gill said their annual expenditure on sports programme for disabled comes to be around Rs 1.5 to 2 lakh. 

“We want to expand on training and infrastructure for our students so that more special athletes can be trained in future,” he added. 

The only discouragement, he said, came in the way was of state governments’ recent exclusion of Special Olympics winners for cash awards.