Time to inject innovative ideas in Indian sports: Sharma

By our Sports Reporter

GUWAHATI, July 16: Former captain of the Indian Badminton team Sanjay Sharma today blamed a section of sports organizers and politicians for poor scerio of sports in India. He also felt that most of the sports organizers of the country are not interested to inject innovative ideas to develop the game.

Sharma is in the city to take part in the Pulin Das Memorial Lecture which was organized by the Assam Sports Jourlists Association at the India club auditorium today. Apart from Sharma the event was attended by renowned sports jourlists Premadhar Sarma, Nesim Ahmed, the former officials of the All Assam Tennis Association along with several former players that included Debashish Roy, shuttler Pradip Chaliha and Madhurjya Barua respectively, cricketer Bimal Bharali along with Kalyan Das, the son of Pulin Das.

Sharma, who earlier visited Guwahati in 70's take part in the Junior tiol Badminton championship, delivered the memorial lecture as a guest speaker. In his speech Sharma highlighted few reasons which are the behind the poor scerio of sports in India . He said, "Other countries are using professiol people to run the sports association but in our country it is completely different scerio. There are many organizations in India which are running by the same officials for more than two decades without doing really something good for their associations. Politicians too are using the sports associations for their mileage and in reply the sports associations are getting nothing. In India most of the sports bodies wait for government to get fund to run their organization where as in the other countries the sports associations generate their own funds appointing professiol people. So unless we don't start to think in different ways and not inject innovative ideas we can't expect noticeable change in the sports in our country."

Sharma also felt India badly needed good number of quality experts to train the young talents of different games. "We don't have highly qualified experts to train our young boys and girls. We should work in that area as without experts we can't produce quality players." He also added: Our society also have to play a big role for the betterment of sports in the country.