21-Mar-2010 120
After an inordinate delay, Bhubaneswar Athletic Association (BAA) has announced to conduct its elections on May 2, two years and eight months after the scheduled date. The annual general meeting of the association, which was held here at the block office today, also constituted a three-member committee for the conduct of the election, which was last held in 2007. S K Ray was named the head of the committee, while Rama Narayan Patnaik and Jayadeb Mohapatra were identified as members.
Delaying or ovoiding elections has been a regular practice for the apex sports body of the capital city. Neeedless to say, the office-bearers have been doing this deliberately to cling to power for extended periods. According to the constitution, office-bearers should be elected for a term of two years. In that case, elections should have been conducted 10 times in the past two decades. But in reality, this has happed only four times. As a result, the term of one panel of office-bearers stretched upto 12 years.
Among the people, responsible for non-conduct of elections in time, BAA president Suresh Kumar Routray`s name comes first. A political leader, belonging to Congress party, Routray has been holding the post for ages, doing nothing or very little for the promotion of sports in the city. Delivering commical and meaningless speeches at sports functions and posing to cameramen remains his best contribution as the head of major sports body. Manoranja Mohanty, a businessmen held the post of secretary for decades before being replaced by Sourya Ranjan Parija in 2007. But Parija has proved to be a bird of same feather.
Bhubaneswar, which has been the home of scores of international and national level sportspersons, boasts of an international-standard stadium and many more infrastructure facilities. Sports consciousness among the citizens is excellent. Youngsters are very much interested to take up sports and excell in it. It is the responsibility of BAA to capitalise on the interest and facilities and make the city a role-model in Orissa. But because of the inefficient office-bearers and their undemocratic style of functioning BAA continues to be useless.
Though sports management is now regarded as respectable profession, requiring education, technical skill, marketing ideas and knowledge of games, office-bearers of BAA remain honorary without any accountability. Though the association gets lot of money, nobody except the officials know how the money is spent. It is surprising that the citizens and sportspersons have been tolerating these inefficient officials for ages.
