Pathway meeting for demanding opening of stadium and full establishment of airport
Berhampur, 22/11 (Abhijit Kar): In front of Barak Stadium, a movement and a road map meeting has been held in front of Barak Stadium, to immediately complete the stadium work and open the lock for the players and to stop neglecting Berhampur and start the construction work of Purnang Airport as soon as possible. It is worth noting that while the construction of Berhampur Barrack Stadium was going on for the last 40 years, the central government handed over the land next to the NCC department for the construction of a full-fledged stadium in 2017. Renovation of the historic stadium has been under way since 2017, which was supposed to be completed in three years, but the work has been going on for the past seven years and has not been completed yet. It is observed that even though the State Sports Minister, Odisha Chief Secretary, FIB-T Secretary, Sports Secretary, Ganjam District Collector, BMC Commissioner visited the developer’s organization repeatedly, no one had any influence on the developer.
No action has been taken against this organization even after seven years of three years’ work. On the other hand, neither the seating capacity of the spectators has been increased in this stadium, nor has the arrangement been made to install floodlights. There is no attempt to bring back the weight lifting, boxing etc. sections which were taken to Kaling Stadium in Bhubaneswar. As this stadium has been locked for the last 7 years, the players of South Odisha are facing difficulties in not having any practice. On this occasion, the forum activists called upon the state government to immediately stop the discriminatory policy towards Ganjam district and to open the lock of this historical barrack stadium immediately and distributed magazines for public awareness.
Brahmapur Purnang Airport work should be done as soon as possible to obtain DGCA approval, start scheduled flight services from Brahmapur immediately, arrange regular flights from Brahmapur to major cities like Calcutta, Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Ahmedabad etc. was claimed for. Forum Secretary V. Someshwar Rao, Lakshmi Narayan Padhi, Pritish Panigarahi, Co-Secretary Manas Ranjan Patra, Praveen Patnaik, Santosh Kumar Sahu, Kiran Kumar Panda, Ramesh Chandra Sahu, Balakrishna Samantharai, Binod Sabat, Aditya Rath, N. Nilamadhav Patra were present at the event, K.Srinivasa Rao, Prakash Bhajani and many activists person were present.