Sr Vice President JKPCC & Former Minister Congress Sham Lal Sharma inaugurated 8th Pawan memorial cricket tournament amidst huge gathering of participating teams, Spectators and local populace at Akhnoor, here today.The tournament is being organized by Singh Cricket Club Akhnoor & AYC Akhnoor under the overall supervision of Sham Singh Langeh (President Singh Cricket Club Akhnoor), Mangu Ram Sharma Ex city president, Rajinder Gupta, Madam Kuldeep Kour, Joginder Magotra, Aman Gupta, Subash Langer, Naresh Sharma (AYC president),Ankush Sharma Sr Youth Congress leader, Raman Gupta, Ram Pal Sharma, Rajinder Sharma were the prominent who attended the occasion.
Speaking on the occasion, Sham Lal Sharma said that youth of the State despite having lot of interest in sports and allied activities and valour and zest for doing better, hardly get much opportunity to showcase their talent and skill, because people around them are least bothered to organise quality tournaments to provide them platform to hone their skill.He said probably that is one of the reasons as to why our State is still lagging behind in the sports sphere at the National scene, adding that absence of State cricketers in Indian Premier League (IPL) portraits picture of the opportunities and the avenues being provided to the State cricketers at the local level.
Sham said that the infrastructure is inadequate, though some steps were taken by the previous Congress-NC Govt. to give boost to the sports activity but present BJP-PDP Govt has miserably failed to raise the infrastructure of sports activity.He further said that the one outdoor stadium was sanctioned at Palwan, Akhnoor & almost 60 -70% work has been completed on it, but thereafter work on the same has come to standstill in the present regime. He asked the Govt. to start the work for this outdoor stadium for the optimum use of the local youths.Sham said that 12 Stadia were sanctioned for J&K state but out of these 9 were given to Kashmir region and only 3 were given to Jammu region. He said this is a glaring example of discrimination against the Jammu region.“The BJP ministers & legislators who consider themselves so called CHAMPIONS have failed to get due share for Jammu region,” he added. (KNS)