LAHORE: The Punjab government on Tuesday decided to restore sports activities in educational institutions across the province, announcing a series of mega sports events to be staged in all schools between October and December.
The decision was taken at a meeting chaired by Punjab Education Minister Rana Sikandar Hayat, who said the events would run through four ascending tiers — tehsil, district, division and provincial — with the Lahore Board hosting the final event in December this year.
The tiered structure matters more than it may first appear. A tehsil-level opening round means that a student in a rural school does not have to travel to a divisional headquarters to enter, and gives players from smaller towns a competitive route upward that begins close to home. Each stage filters winners into the next, so the December final in Lahore will be the endpoint of a province-wide funnel rather than a single showpiece fixture.
Rana Sikandar Hayat announced an increase in reward money for the games, with the amounts fixed at Rs 100,000, Rs 300,000 and Rs 500,000.
He said winning players would be given opportunities to compete at both national and international levels — a commitment that, if honoured, would give the school programme a purpose beyond the trophy round by feeding talent into competitive pathways that currently sit largely outside the public school system.
The minister was also explicit about equipment quality, stating that no compromise would be made on the standard of the sports kits. Kit quality has been a recurring complaint in school-level competition, where poor-grade equipment has both raised injury risk and limited the usefulness of the exercise for genuinely promising athletes.
On the administrative side, the minister said sports committees have been established in all 35,000 schools across the province, giving each institution a designated body responsible for organising participation rather than leaving the task to ad hoc arrangements.
He added that 450 schools have already been provided with sports equipment.
That figure sets the practical scale of the challenge ahead. With committees now formed at 35,000 schools but equipment delivered to 450, the distribution effort will need to move at pace over the coming weeks if the October start date is to find schools ready to field teams rather than merely willing to.
The restoration of organised sports in Punjab’s schools addresses a gap that has drawn steady criticism from parents, coaches and physical education teachers, who have argued that the erosion of structured play has narrowed the school day to examinations alone and cut off one of the few routes by which children from low-income households have historically entered competitive sport.
The immediate tests will be procurement speed, the release schedule for the announced reward money, and whether the tehsil-level rounds in October draw participation from government schools outside the major urban centres — the constituency the programme’s tiered design appears built to reach.
Further details on event schedules, eligibility and the disciplines to be included are expected from the School Education Department as the October start approaches.
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