After a four-year gap, the Kerala State Central School Sports meet, exclusively for students of schools affiliated to CBSE and Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE), will be held on February 9 and 10 in Thiruvananthapuram. To be organised under the aegis of the Kerala State Sports Council, the meet will be held at the Sports Authority of India's Lakshmibai National College of Physical Education (LNCPE) campus at Kariavattom, reported TNIE.
The date and schedule for the meet were finalised at a recent meeting chaired by Sports Council president Mercy Kuttan in which CBSE regional director Mahesh Dharmadhikari, National Council of CBSE Schools (NCCS) Secretary-General Indira Rajan and representatives of schools affiliated to CISCE participated. The decision to revive the meet was taken following a special initiative by Sports Minister V Abdurahman to encourage sporting talents in non-state syllabus schools and to provide them with a state-level platform to compete.
According to TNIE, students of Kendriya Vidyalayas and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas will also participate in the meeting. At present, students of institutions affiliated with national boards take part in school and cluster-level competitions and only top performers at the cluster level are considered for the competitions at the national level. The state general education department conducts a sports meet-up at the state level but it is confined only to students from schools following the state syllabus.
According to the Sports Council, the district-level selection trials for the state-level meet will be held at the respective districts. "The selection trials will be completed by January 25 and the registration for the state-level competition will begin soon after," said an official of the state Sports Council, according to TNIE. Owing to the limited time, only athletics events in the under-14 years and under-17 years categories will be held this year.
"The teams that secure first and second position in the district level will be eligible to participate in the state level," Indira Rajan, secretary general of NCCS told TNIE. She added that schools can complete registration for the event by August 18. The state has over 1,300 CBSE schools and 162 schools affiliated with CISCE besides 41 Kendriya Vidyalayas and 14 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas. In 2018, the meet was held for the first time grandly in the capital with Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan inaugurating the event.
