The Neighbourhood and Village level of the Punjab Youth Festival concluded on Thursday with a record number of 1.5 million people and youth participated in different events throughout the province and 3,36,560 won their respective competitions.
On the final day of the Neighbourhood and Village phase, hectic competitions were recorded with a total participation of members of the Sports and Youth Development Council in province was around 90,000 and out of those 20508 earned limelight.
People from around 5678 blocks and localities from 1127 UCs took part in 429 events. And now the selection committee, under the supervision of a jury, would shortlist the top performers of different events to form teams to compete in the next level of the Festival, which is the Union Council level.
The Union Council level, the second stage of the Festival, will roll into action on September 8 and will conclude on September 18. In Lahore’s Iqbal Town, cricket tape ball, badminton, billiard, athletics, arm wrestling and tug of war competitions were played. In UC 100 Farooq-e-Azam XI, Jillani XI, Royal Fighter XI, Ghazi XI and Striker XI won the respective cricket matches. In badminton, Naveed, Jawad and Usman beat Khalid, Jamil and Muneeb respectively. In Billiard, Mohammad Atique, Mohammad Shakeel, Mohammad Umair, Rana Awais and Atif Chohan clinched their game.
Meanwhile, Yasir Akram, Abbas Builder, Ali Zaffar were the winners of Arm Wrestling competitons. In Athletics, 100 m race, Ibrahim Basit, Zeeshan Wahab and Shan Rafique were the winners of first three places in sequence while Jhang XI was the winning team of Tug of war against Rafique Tigers 2-0. In Shalimar Town, union council 47’s Mujahidabad won the cricket match. In tug of war, Block 5 of union council 47 won the activity. In Data Ganj Bakhsh union council 85, Akram X1 defeated Akbar X1, Malik X1 beat Jaferia X1 in cricket. In Arm Wrestling, union council 82’Anwar X1 was declared winner and Nabeel X1 of union council 94 succeeded. In Ravi Town, 2 blocks from union council 29 participated in Arm Wrestling in which Hafiz Adeeb-ur-Rehman was declared successful. In Badminton, union council 30’s Umer Usmani beat Zaidi 2-0.
In other districts of Lahore division including Sheikhupura, Kasur and Nankana Sahib around 3092 youngsters got involved in all the nine events of the first level. The competitions were held in athletics, arm wrestling, badminton, volleyball, tug or war, billiard and cricket tape ball while the two general events included naat khani and qirat. In these competitions, 162 blocks of 50 UCs contested in 45 events. In all 1717 won their respective competitions.
Rawalpindi had an involvement of more than 2000 people from 163 blocks of 115 UCs in 53 events and 733 won their matches while in Sargodha, competitions were held in 37 events with the participation of 5100 members of 84 S&YDCs and from among 205 blocks, 1697 members won their events.
In Gujranwala, 8490 had clashed from 1057 blocks in 53 events and with the involvement of 142 UCs, around 2710 moved into the final selection round. Faisalaabd city had 11845’s participation in 40 events with 2439 declared winners and an overall of 15981 participated in whole of Faisalabad division where 186 UCs’ 1165 blocks had competitions in 47 events. Around 11650 participated in 62 events in Multan where 1125 blocks of 185 UCs showed interest on the final day with win coming 4170 youngsters’ way. And in Dera Ghazi Khan, 931 blocks of 144 S&YDCs took part in the competitions and a total of 14303 youngsters competed in 28 events while 2572 were the winners.
