Nuh beats notoriety with passion for sports

Before the first rays of the sun even touch his house in Haryana's Nuh, Akram Khan wakes up, gobbles up a quick breakfast, and cycles to Nagina village stadium - 6 km away from his home, and 67 km away from Gurugram.

- Leena Dhankhar

It is 5am on a chilly December morning, and the 21-year-old is one of the 30 young men gathered at the stadium for a game of cricket. "I want to play in an Indian Premier League (IPL) team," he said, mid-training.

Dressed in blue tracksuit pants, a white T-shirt, and a worn-out pair of shoes, Akram is the team's star, an all-rounder who has scored a century, and taken four wickets in the match.

Back home by 10am, Akram feeds cattle, and then heads to the fields with his father. Till three months ago, his day looked rather different.

Till September, Akram and his friends would meet on the outskirts of his village, near the fields, and call those looking to sell second-hand cars - in a bid to dupe them. This is one of the many scams that added to Nuh's infamy as the cyber-crime capital of the country.

"I did this for four years, was also arrested twice. Right now, I am out on bail. I had to sell my house and my motorcycle to pay off money that I had earned by duping people in the last four years... I had to change my life, and then this came around," said Akram.

In the last week of November, the Nuh police took over seven sports facilities, six gymnasiums and two open grounds; hired ex-army men and government officials; and went door to door to rope in young men of Nuh to take up sports.

"The police asked the sarpanch of the villages to encourage families to convince their sons to take up a sport. That's how the boys started showing up," said Asaf Ali (63), a retired bank official, who is deployed as a volunteer in one of the stadiums in Shahpue Nangli village.

The inception

Narender Bijarniya, superintendent of police (SP), Nuh, said that the idea took shape during the investigation into the Nuh violence in September this year, in which six people were killed, 88 were injured, and loss of public property worth crores was reported.