Tirkey goes back to the grassroots
The tribal belt of Orissa, Bihar and Jharkhand has contributed a number of national and international level athletes down the decades.
However, many of them have had to overcome primitive infrastructure as well as poverty and Maoist violence before shining for their states and country.
Now, former India hockey captain Dilip Tirkey, a Rajya Sabha MP, has taken an important step to improve infrastructure for the most popular game in his region.
The top defender, who played in the 1996, 2000 and 2004 Olympics, is getting an artificial hockey pitch laid in his village, Saunamara, in Orissa’s backward Sundargarh district.
Tirkey said the field with be sand-based, which required far less maintenance, especially when it came to watering. “The construction work has started and in a couple of weeks the pitch will be ready,” he said.
Tirkey says the pitch will attract youngsters from nearby villages too. “If a student is good in sports there are lots of avenues these days. Perhaps a good job will change their lifestyle and at the same time discourage them from picking up guns as the region is a hotbed of Maoists,” he told HT from Bhubaneswar.
Tirkey knows the value of quality infrastructure when a boy or girl takes up a sport, having begun his decade-long playing career on an uneven, muddy playground in his village, until he joined the Sports Authority of India training centre in Sundargarh. “Usually, kids dribble on any barren patch of earth, but that will be history now,” he said.
FUNDS A CHALLENGE Acquiring land for the hockey turf wasn’t an issue, but funds were. He helped generate funds to the tune of R 5.5 crore, the estimated cost of the project. He contributed R 1 crore from his MPLAD (MP local area development scheme) fund and appealed to others, including corporate houses, for help.
“It was a challenging task, but the response was good. It wasn’t possible for one department to give the full amount. The best way forward was to pool in resources. Corporate houses like Steel Authority of India came forward for a common cause of developing sports infrastructure in the village,” he said.
Tirkey hoped his effort would push others to help raise infrastructure in the region. Besides the full hockey pitch, he has also initiated a plan to have a sandbased six-a-side hockey turf and an artificial football ground.