PEC lifts time ban on sports activities, students hail move

CHANDIGARH: The Punjab Engineering College (PEC) University of Technology has relaxed rules regarding playing sports in the college campus as students can now use the college stadiums and courts even after 5pm which was earlier out of bounds. The sports infrastructure has been upgraded and is well-equipped to be utilized even at nigh time.
Principal Dheeraj Sanghi told TOI, “Learning for students must not be confined to classrooms.They must be encouraged to participate in extra-curricular activities along with studies to have an overall personality development. Keeping this in consideration, we have upgraded all the sports facilities and permitted students to play any sports activities at night as well. For this, we have installed flood light to keep all the sporting sites well lit at night time in and around the sports facilities and erecting fencing around them.”
According to P J Singh, dean, Students Affairs, around Rs 4 crore was spent on uprgradation of the existing sports infrastructure and also to create two new synthetic lawn tennis. The swimming pool too has been renovated with a new filtering plant to maintain hygiene. “Students can play till late midnight. There is no time bar on the sports activities in college campus any more. Our next step will be to create a competitive environment in sports inside the campus. After having started cricket league matches among students of various hostels, soon we will start conducting matches class-wise as well.”
Students are quite excited about the relaxation in time limit and extolled college authorities for the move. “We were not able to play much of sports earlier as many times our classes would come to an end at 5 pm which was the deadline to play sports in the campus. But with the lifting of restriction, we will be able to not only hone our sporting skills but also practice more for the sports competitions,” a student, said.
Another student was of the opinion that during summer, it is not feasible to play before 5 due to scorching heat while during winter, it gets dark after 6 pm. The students hailed the decision of the authorities and said that relaxation in norms would help them ease stress due to studies and they will be able focus on physical fitness as well as create more bonding with each other.
Singh added that the college has won prestigious sports competitions last year and hence they would like to take the legacy forward.