The sports ministry has decide to create two National Centres of Excellence (NCE) in Guwahati and Imphal to provide special training to some selected athletes with an aim to make them qualify for the 2024 and 2028 Olympic events.
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A total of 20 such NCEs including those two will be created out of the existing sports institutes in the country.
The Sports Authority of India (SAI) centres in Guwahati and Imphal have been designed as NCEs.
As per reports, the sports institutes which will be identified as NCEs will provide same level of training to some elite athletes.
Moreover, the athletes who will train at the NCEs will all follow a single scheme that had been designed for them.
The decision to create NCEs came in order to ensure that athletes in the same premises have access to the same facilities.
However, grassroots level athletes will be trained in NCE excluded sports institutes and will be moved to any of the twenty NCEs only on the basis of their performance.
The two tier training system has been improvised with an aim to improve the performance of the athletes and to provide special focus in training each athlete.
The other 18 sports institutes that have been identified as NCEs include SAI centres in Patiala, Trivandrum, Chandigarh, Sonepat, Lucknow, Kolkata, Bhopal, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Gandhinagar, Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, Delhi, Indira Gandhi Stadium, Delhi, Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium, Delhi, Dr. Karni Singh Shooting Range, Delhi, Dr Shyama Prasad Mookherjee Swimming Pool Complex, Delhi, National Water Sports Academy ,Alleppey, National Boxing Academy, Rohtak, National Wrestling Academy, Aurangabad.