GAIL Indian Speedstar - Promoting young talents across India

GAIL, the well-known Indian PSU in field of Natural Gas Production and distribution has been making new business highs since its advent in 1984. As a corporate it has been doing different CSR activities and has now embarked into a new domain of promoting Young athletes from grassroots level. GAIL has done partnership with National Yuva Cooperative Society for this initiative called “GAIL Indian Speedster” whose goal is to find young athletes across length and breadth of India who are extremely talented and can be potential great hopes for India in future Olympics. National Yuva Cooperative Society has tied up with Anglian Medal Hunt Company as its Technical Partner for The GAIL Indian Speedstar project

The reason to launch this program is to identify, select and nurture the hidden talent in athletes. The targeted age group is 11 - 17 years in 100m, 200m and 800m track events across. The Project has goals to create a pool of athletes with knack which will possibly bring honor for India in track events at the highest echelon of sporting events - the Olympics 2020/2024. A panel of eminent sportspersons like P.T Usha, Rachita Mistry, Anuradha Biswal and Kavita Raut have been appointed in the selection committee to support selections and guide coaching camps. As members of the selection committee their role would include creating the selection criteria or the GAIL-Indian Speedstar program, and developing the training plan and module for the selected athletes at the National Level. Dr Ashutosh Karnatak, Director (Projects) GAIL (India) Ltd, Rajesh Pande, President, National Yuva Cooperative Society Ltd and Maneesh Bahuguna- CEO, Anglian Medal Hunt Company were also present during launch of the project in New Delhi.

District trials were conducted under the watchful eyes of coaches and selectors, appointed by the selection committee. The selection of the athletes was based on talent identification and selection criteria set by the selection committee. Initiatory, in its first year, earlier this year with initial trials conducted at 55 districts across 10 states in which more than 25,000 children participated out of which 850 children made it to the State level.

The first State level camp and trial was organized on 27-28th of February in SawaiMaan Singh Stadium, Jaipur where 60 boys and girls participated out of which 4 have qualified for the next level. The state trials were held in Odisha (14 Selection), Delhi (28 Selection), Kerala (28 Selection) and Jharkhand (4 Selection) followed by Maharashtra and Gujarat in the last week of April. The shortlisted children from the State trials will then participate in the National camp and selection which is scheduled to be held in May 2016 at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, New Delhi. Shortlisted athletes from state trials will attend an intensive national level camp. At the conclusion of the coaching camp, final trials will be held. Winners will be selected based on the qualification criteria and their potential. The winners will be given extensive training throughout the year. The top 9 athletes will then be provided with a world class coaching for over a period of 5 years with an ultimate objective of one of these athletes to represent India at the Olympics.

Follow all the activities related to GAIL Indian Speedstar at its Facebook page and on Twitter .

Freedom to think big and think new for Career development

We Indians are known for our value system and manners which includes always listening to our parents. These values are right up to a certain extent only and when these start affecting education and career, it must be confronted with. Many times parents ask their kids to go through the same process with which they themselves had gone through in their career, like if father had done engineering from IIT, he would expect and many times force his kid to do the same or if Mother had done MBBS and is a doctor she would expect her kid to do the same.

These things might have been right in some way may be 30-40 years back when there were not many different opportunities for education and career but certainly not in present time. There are so many career opportunities young people now a days have that they can pursue their dreams and become successful in the field they like. The dynamics of the time we are living in is changing every single day and if parents try to make their kids follow same old chain of thoughts and career development process, kids might get left behind to never come up again with confidence. Aspects of spirituality that were there when parents were young is still the same, but the technology to make one smart phone has advanced in unimaginative way since that time, so when it comes to career development, parents should guide kids keeping present ecosystem in mind and not the past obsolete one.

There are universities like Lovely Professional University that offers multiple career development options to young students. There Students are given various options to choose from and are not forced upon with only certain type of courses. Parents should think big and give their kids freedom to choose from various career development opportunities LPU has and should support them throughout. 

Here is a nice short video by LPU showcasing why thinking big is so important when it comes to creating a career https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaQdCkNLtjU&feature=youtu.be

Remember that only if Parents can think BIG, Child will think BIG.