The Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) is making an investment heavily in sports activities infrastructure to produce ace athletes from a “large pool of raw talents”.
One of the objectives is to improve the quality of individual sportspersons playing for the Indian Railways and increase the bench strength of the national carrier’s teams, officers said.
“We have in the last six months completed a gymnasium of international standard, a weightlifting arena with competition and practice platforms, a physiotherapy room for sportspersons, and an indoor cricket hall with Astroturf and bowling machines,” NFR’s General Manager Anshul Gupta said.
These facilities are around NFR’s headquarters in Guwahati’s Maligaon, wherein a multipurpose stadium is coming up. This stadium will have a six-lane synthetic track, a boxing ring, and basketball, archery and volleyball courts.
A cricket stadium at Maligaon and a football ground at Pandu nearby are also being upgraded.
“We have also taken up a multipurpose stadium project in [eastern Assam’s] Dibrugarh, whilst work on the National Centre of Excellence, a joint venture with the Sports Authority of India at Cooch Behar [northern West Bengal] is in progress,” Mr Gupta said.
The Cooch Behar facility, anticipated to cost ₹three hundred crore, will aid eleven disciplines.
“The NFR isn’t always neglecting the other northeastern States that are slightly at the country’s railway map. Joint ventures are being formed with the Governments of Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Mizoram for a multipurpose sports complex each,” Rajiv Mahajan, president of the NFR Sports Association said.
There are greater than 2,000 youngsters and teens from the area present process education on the NFR’s present sports activities centers, he added.
The first main event to underline the NFR’s thrust on “empowering sportspersons” in the northeast is the first-ever collection of half-marathons scheduled on February 5. The half-marathons would be organized in Guwahati, Darjeeling, Tawang and Gangtok.
About 3,000 runners from across India are expected to take part in the half-marathons for a total prize money of ₹11 lakh, NFR officers said.
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