Bihar children to compete for 'Bal Shree' awards

Bihar children, for the first time, will now compete for the prestigious `Bal Shree' awards. Instituted by the National Bal Bhawan in 1995, the award, meant for children coming under the age bracket from 9 to 16 years, aims at identification and promotion of creativity among children in science, writing, performance and arts.

The state children were unable to compete for this award earlier as Bihar did not have its Bal Bhawan in place and according to rules only those children can compete at the national level who have been recommended by the Bal Bhawans of their respective states. With a full-fledged Bal Bhawan, christened `Kilkari', functioning here since last year, now steps are being taken to identify children who can compete for the four categories -- creative performance, creative arts, creative scientific innovation and creative writing.

Giving details, Kilkari director Jyoti Parihar told on Sunday, "Workshops would be organized at the headquarters of all the nine divisions of the state and selection of children for all the categories would be done by a panel of experts." She said that the selection panel would consist of experts from different fields and selections would be made in a very transparent manner.

Steps are being taken to disseminate information about these workshops, so that children having talent in the aforesaid fields could attend the workshops which will be organized at divisional headquarters.

As many as 14 children would be selected from each of the nine divisions and the selected ones would have to take part at a state-level competition through which eight finalists would be selected.

"All the finalists would be given exhaustive training at Patna and a team of experts would be there to guide the selected children and also to fine tune their skills," Parihar said.

Incidentally, the finalists would have to compete at zonal level competition to be held in Kolkata sometime in August and those emerging winners would qualify for taking part at the national level competition to be held in Delhi later this year.

"A few months experience of running the Bihar Bal Bhawan shows that Bihar children have immense creative talent and by reaching out to more of them through divisional level workshops, we expect to discover talents who could bring laurels to the state," she said.link