Policy Matters

The national sports policy is bereft of any vision nor does it have any tangible targets to achieve

By Nadeem Iqbal

"We don't have a tennis star like Sania Mirza who could pull the crowd and ultimately corporate sponsors to the tennis tournaments," says an official of tennis federation while talking to TNS.

The official said that the federation is in the process of constructing a tennis complex and in-house academy where talented tennis children will be coached to become future stars. But the federation is finding it hard to attract any corporate donations.

While the only incentive to the sports sector is that of tax exemption to their donations. The absence of stars in almost all the sports except cricket has made it impossible to attract corporate money into the sports activity.

This has left the sports managers of the country to be dependent on public money and some other money generated through some lottery schemes.

As far as the official money is concerned, the fact that the original development budget of 523 million rupees allocated for the federal sports division in the annual budget 2007-8 was revised downward to Rs 426 million by the end of the year and further slashed to Rs 350 million for the current fiscal year is enough to substantiate that the sports is in dilapidated condition and there is no officially consolidated approach to improve it.

This situation is also reflected in the three-year-old revised national sports policy, which is bereft of any vision. Its implementation strategy also does not have any tangible targets to achieve.

No wonder the policy remains a non-starter. The policy is completely delinked from international sports activities and tournaments. Its focus is more on the development of sports at regional level but does not clearly specify how this activity will be linked to international sports events.

The mission statement enunciated by the policy document says, "The policy aims at promotion of sports at grass root level, enhancing public affiliation with the teams, ensuring all tournaments originate from inter-club level and culminate at the national level."

As per policy, the officials seem to have developed this realisation that the people of Pakistan have almost lost interest in games organised at national and provincial levels, due to poor standard of sports. Besides other measures, proper formation of genuine clubs on area basis is essential. "The criteria for registration of a club will be enunciated by each sporting National Federation. Clubs in a tehsil/district must also register with the Sports Officer of the provincial government deputed in tehsil/district or equivalent administrative area for scrutiny, financial help and utilization of Government sporting facilities, where necessary. This will bring in mass participation and also help improving our sporting abilities. This will also provide an opportunity to our young sports persons to rise upwards and eventually be part of national teams."

Although the policy provides for an elaborate system of the elections of local sports bodies, it has not succeeded in ending the controversies surrounding the elections and term of the office of the office bearers. The policy specifies a term of four year for an office-bearer and he or she can not stay on for more than two terms but there are reports that in many cases the official continued on same position for over two decades.

In a recent meeting of the senate committee on sport, when the Pakistan Sports Board (PSB) officials were questioned over their failure to implement the sports policy, they blamed the provincial sports ministries, saying that they were the ones responsible for the failure.

The PSB officials were found lacking updates on the number of sports events held in the country under the policy.

PSB's mandate includes assisting national federations in holding of national level tournaments by providing sporting facilities (only playing fields) free of any charge and constructing sports complexes for these games down to every District and tehsil Headquarters. These complexes on completion will be handed over to local governments and district or tehsil Sports Organizations for maintenance and use.

The sports infrastructure envisaged by the policy consists of clubs, district, provincial and national bodies besides a separate directorate in the education ministry to oversee regular observance of sports activities in schools and other educational institutions. But no document is available to show the level of progress.

There has also been a lopsided stress on women sports as the policy says, "all Sports Federations will organize club, inter district and national appropriate sports for women. Women Wings (where feasible) will be created in Federations/Associations."

An increasing number of failures at international events makes it pertinent that the government should come out with an ambitious action plan in consultation with media, local governments and corporate sector and should set for itself practical targets with clear benchmarks.

Courtesy: The News Pakistan