Online Inter College Debate Competition



ONLINE INTER COLLEGE DEBATE COMPETITION

To fight with the boredom with which every person in this nation is facing, Literary Club MIT AOE thought of an initiative which will engage students to read and study different aspects of Indian politics.

Topic was decided based on the previous situations which were prevailing in the nation just before the pandemic’s outbreak, which was the CAA NRC protests. Based on an intense study and reading of well curated documents of the PIB and NIC of the GOI, the moderators of the online debate Shreyas Deo and Swastika Gosavi went ahead with a very controversial and a vast topic to discuss, which was;

“Left wing market anarchism is present due to incompetent defense of the right wing”

To give a brief explanation on the aspects of the topic which were supposed to be discussed and the speech was to be framed, Moderator Shreyas Deo proceeded by preparing a crisp and short study guide which can be used by the participants for reference purposes.

To explain the conduct of the debate and to make the participants well versed with the ROP i.e; Rules of Procedure of the competition. Moderators conducted an online meeting on the Zoom app a day before the competition that is on 11th April 2020 at 1800 Hours particularly to discuss the conduct and to provide the participants some guidelines regarding the framing of their speech. Special tips and advises were given on how to generally speak and go ahead in any debate and how to deal with the dynamic circumstances of the debate like arguments, counter arguments, rebuttal, follow ups etc.

To move ahead with a controversial topic, the club was ready to conduct an intense and a heated debate over Zoom Cloud meetings platform. It was conducted on 12 April at 1730 Hours.

The club received registrations from all over the colleges of Pune for example; Symbiosis, VIT, St. Meera’s, ILS Pune, SIMS, SIU and also from the various other cities of Maharashtra like Nagpur’s RCOEM, LIT etc.

Judges were Poorva Joshi and Abhas Tripathi who were the point of contacts of the Club’s faculty Coordinator Prof. Vithika Sidhabhatti.

The debate was very much dynamic in nature and was conducted in the following method

ROP:- 3 Phase Conduct
First Phase:- Introductory
4 speeches from the For team
4 speeches from the Against team
Intent :- To set the motion for the debate
Each speech duration will be 3 minutes.
Second Phase:- Main Argument
Every participant gets a chance to speak for 4 minutes
Rebuttal round: Each participant one question to one fellow participant, no follow ups allowed.
Third Phase:- Conclusion
3 speeches from the For team
3 speeches from the Against team
Intent:- To get closing statements from both sides
Each speech duration will be 3 minutes.

After an intense and a serious debate of 3 Hours, the conclusion which was drawn by the judges and the moderators was,

“The right wing needs to throw its cards right ,on time and at right platforms to atleast make them accountable to what they write and atleast make them bother to collect valid facts to make a claim rather than doing comfortable hit jobs and individual activism.”

List of Prize Winners: -

My order of awards are
1.) Best speakers in the left:
a.) Aditya Pandey
b.) Chaitanya Ranade
2.) Best Speakers in the right
a.) Medha Sharma
b.) Munish Perke
3.) Best Question
Azfar Mustafa
4.) Best answer
Aditya Pandey to Prabal Mehrotra

The organizers also put forth the idea for an online Elocution Competition in the next few days and the personal response of the participants regarding joining the clubs external activities was quite significant.

Link for the recording of this debate: