After every electoral battle, heady slogans fade away and are forgotten; but not ‘Khela hobe (let’s play)’. First voiced by Trinamul Congress chief, Mamata Banerjee the catchy call to the voters, floating and committed, has become the name of a state government project which will be kicked off in July.

‘Khela hobe’ will indeed live up to its name as the state sports and youth affairs department project involves distributing footballs to clubs all over the state. Chanted by the Trinamul chief at almost every election rally, Mamata sometimes threw a football to the crowd to drive her message home during poll rallies.

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In all, 50,000 footballs will be distributed as part of the project. The effort to draw the youth to football is timely as even if Sourav Ganguly did the state proud with his achivements  with the willow and canny captaincy, ‘the beautiful game’ had been the mainstay of  state’s sports and entertainment  for decades so much so that a barefooted Uttam Kumar was seen onscreen dribbling past opponents on a muddy field while Suchitra Sen not too happily looked on.

Apart from local clubs, footballs will also be given to schools with sporting infrastructure, a senior official said. In the fitness of things, the footballs are of  local brand, ‘Joyee’ (victorious). The name of brand was picked up by the chief minister herself.

Its recipients were differently abled persons, refugees and inmates of correctional homes. Non-governmental organisations will not be part of the project, it was learnt. This is to rectify an earlier  situation when footballs were given to NGOs, but some clubs were left out.

One of the most effective pep talks of recent times, the two word chant  has not only enthused the foot soldiers of a political outfit who made it the state’s  ruling party for the third time running, it also made Prime Minister, Narendra Modi coin his own version of it ‘Unnayaner Khela Hobe’(Let’s play for development) during the poll campaign.Come July, it remains to be seen  if the kick-off to ‘khela hobe’ can restore state soccer to its old glory.