Five-time world champion boxer Mary Kom has more on her mind than just the Olympics,for which she will start training in Delhi next week. She has temporarily shut down her free boxing academy in Imphal because she could no longer sustain it amid Manipurs economic blockade. There are 23 boxing students whom we train here. The idea behind the academy when I set it up was to find talent among Manipurs poor families,the underprivileged. Boxing has done wonders for me and I was hoping for the same for them, says Kom,at the cottage gifted by the state government after she won her first championship,and from where she runs the academy. The Manipuri Regional Boxing Foundation has sent three of her trainees to Patiala where a championship is on currently. She has built a makeshift shed where she keeps boxing and gym equipment. Classes are free; the academy has hired a coach. The girls would stay in her house,the boys in a home nearby. Now,Kom has sent them home to their villages. We could not keep them,with not enough food. Things are really expensive now, says Kom,who works with the Manipur police and runs the academy with whatever she earns by endorsing Herbal Life and Sahara products. Kom has one gas cylinder that she has kept for an emergency. She now cooks using firewood collected by locals near the Games Village in the lap of a line of green hills. They sell the firewood to homes without gas at Rs 200 per pound. Minister N Biren,spokesperson for the government,said the adminsitration has made efforts to ensure that commodities are more easily available than earlier. While the long queues for petrol may not have disappeared completely,they have considerably reduced. There are no queues in the night at all. We have been collecting sales data every evening and monitoring to ensure that no one is hoarding or black marketing any commodity. Things have improved in the past few days, he said. We have now instituted a rule under which one family cannot receive more than one LPG cylinder at a time. Before,they were taking up to three-four cylinders. The government is bringing in 40 trucks with LPG cylinders this week,he said. Biren adds that the government is providing security to goods vehicles and has issued orders to control the prices of cereals and vegetables.
