City's military academy gets ready for President's visit

CHENNAIi: The Officers Training Academy (OTA) at St Thomas Mount is being spruced for Pranab Mukherjee's visit next month.
On September 10, the President will take part in the pass-out ceremony of the OTA where 272 gentlemen and lady cadets are gearing up to become officers in the Army. Mukherjee, the Supreme Commander of the armed forces, will be the third President to visit OTA after R Venkataraman and Pratibha Patil.
Major General V D Chowgule, deputy commandant and OTA chief instructor, said, "Work on sprucing up the academy for the president's visit has been on for several months.It is in full swing now." Security would be heightened during the visit, he said adding that Chennai was the ideal training place due to its challengingly hot climate and the training grounds along Old Mahabalipuram Road and Grand Southern Trunk Road. "All facilities in the academy are air-conditioned to beat the heat. When we require hilly training grounds, we take the cadets to Vellore which is close enough," he said.
As part of co-curricular activities, OTA has established clubs for horse riding, martial arts, yoga, sailing, golf, squash, archery, parasailing and rock climbing among others. Chowgule said, "The sportsmanship imbibed through the academy's world-class training prepares the cadets to become Olympians."
The cadets who are nearing the end of their gruelling 49-week course are gearing up for the pass-out parade which will be reviewed by the President.
Lady cadets who comprise about 10% of the batch strength trained alongside the gentlemen cadets, mixing seamlessly into the crowd. Of the 272 cadets expected to be commissioned as officers next month, 32 are lady cadets.
Lady cadet Ritika Dahiya from the academy's Zojila Company said, "You can hardly tell the difference between a lady and a gentleman cadet here at the academy. We are trained the same way as men." The academy which excludes women from only a handful of activities, has recently started boxing training for them.
Established in 1963, OTA is the only one of the country's three academies in the country where women are trained. The six-month course started for women in 1992 was later changed to a one-year course in 2008 to bring it on a par with the training for gentlemen cadets.