An international debating tournament for schoolchildren will be held in Chennai from July 18 to July 21.
As many as 15 teams from various countries are participating in the first-ever international event, called “Mini Worlds”, which is being organised by the Indian Schools Debating Society (ISDS). The tournament will be held in the format followed by World Schools Debating Championships.
According to an ISDS communiqué, the event would be represented by teams from The Netherlands, England, Wales, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand, Sri Lanka, South Korea and Hong Kong. Three teams will represent India.
One of the Indian teams will have a visually challenged student from Mumbai, Bhavya Shah. This is for the first time that a visually challenged speaker will be participating in international debating championship. Bhavya is a 12th grade student at Rao’s Junior College of Science.
“Bhavya uses an accessibility-enabled laptop to follow other speeches and gives his own eight minute speeches perfectly from memory,” said the release.
ISDS, which started with just five schools in Chennai in the 2008, now has covered 10 cities, reaching out to over 1,000 students in more than 200 schools across the country. Besides training students to represent the country at World Schools championships, ISDS has been engaged in nurturing students to participate in other international tournaments.
Ragini Srinivasan, coordinator, ISDS, said that while there are other debating formats like the British Parliamentary Competition, ISDS had opted for the WSD. “This is an invitational international tournament being held ahead of the WSD championship in Thailand from July 24 to August 1. As such, the Chennai event would be a warm-up one for the teams, as all of them would be participating in the world championship. That’s why [we] have named it as ‘Mini Worlds’. In Thailand, they would be among the 64 teams vying for the top honours,” she added.
First Published:
Jul 17, 2019 00:00 IST
Source: HindustanTimes