May 12, 2007	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 24, 1428

KARACHI, May 11: The Pakistan Sports Board (PSB) has submitted a proposed budget of Rs500 million for the next fiscal year of 2007-08 to the government for necessary approval, informed sources told Dawn.

According to sources, if the budget gets approved, half of the money is to be utilised for development and the remaining on non-development projects.

The proposed amount matches the grant released by the government for 2006-07, showing no further increase. The development grant is spent on creating infrastructure across the country whereas holding national camps, foreign trips and providing some funding to affiliated national sports federations comes under non-development head.

In addition, the PSB also shares the burden of National Games by releasing a grant of Rs5 million to the host provincial Olympic body.

The PSB has time and again come under fire from national sports federations which always look to Islamabad and consider their annual token grants as ‘insulting’.

There are nearly 30 sports federations, with many of them redundant, and yet they want status at par with medal winning sports.

Though the emergence of Pakistan Sports Trust (PST) three years back has changed the fate of sports federations who have been dished out millions of rupees, the standard has drastically gone down. There’s no title in Pakistan’s kitty today. The blind, the deaf and dumb cricket teams are presently the country’s flag-bearers abroad.

This reflects that there are flaws in the system which needs to be addressed besides bringing transparency in PST.