Khelo India medal winners from Haryana to get direct admission to Motilal Nehru School of Sports

Chandigarh: Young sportspersons from Haryana who bagged medals in the recently-concluded Khelo India Youth Games (KIYG) will be eligible to seek admission to the Motilal Nehru School of Sports (MNSS) in Rai, Sonipat, without having to appear for any entrance examination.

Players from Haryana — which came in second after Maharashtra in the overall medal tally — bagged 128 medals (41 gold, 32 silver and 55 bronze) in the 4th Khelo India Youth Games (KIYG) held in Madhya Pradesh. An annual multi-disciplinary sports competition, it was open to athletes under 18 years of age looking to compete in a wide range of sports.

S.S. Deswal, who made the announcement Monday on behalf of the Sports University of Haryana of which he is the vice-chancellor, told ThePrint over the phone, “These children have already proved themselves at the national level. So, we have decided that there is no need to ask them to appear in the test we normally conduct.”

Deswal, an IPS of the Haryana cadre, retired as director-general of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) on 31 August 2021 and was appointed the first V-C of the Sports University of Haryana at Rai last December.

Adding that the plan is to give admission to 200 young sportspersons this academic year, Deswal said, “As many of the medal-winning students wish to join, they will be given admission. We want to provide them with the best education with sports training in our school.”

He also said that medal winners will be eligible to seek admission to classes 5-9 and class 11.

“We don’t give direct admission to classes 10 and 12. Admission is open to the rest of the classes. Players who won medals are mostly of school-going age. Though the maximum age limit for playing in the KIYG is 18, most of the players, I have been informed, are quite young and are of school-going age,” he told ThePrint.

The Motilal Nehru School of Sports was founded in July 1973 by the Haryana government as a co-educational boarding school. A member of the Indian Public Schools Conference and affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the school was ranked eighth in the country in a nationwide survey conducted by EducationToday.co in 2017.

(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)

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