QED is a 3-vs-3 Asian Parliamentary debating competition which was first held seven years ago and takes place annually. To gain insight into the preparation required for a successful tournament, and to understand how this edition of QED faired, the EPC interviewed Arpit Mohanty, Tournament Director for QED ‘19.

Serious preparation for QED started around one and a half months before the fest. Colleges were first contacted as early as the middle of January in the hopes of attracting as many teams as possible. Before the fest began, a total of 70 participants with 16 debating teams were registered for the event. According to Arpit, his role as Tournament Director majorly involved getting participation and ensuring ground-level preparation with respect to prize money and logistics for the event.

Despite DebSoc’s original goal of bringing in 80 participants, only 30 participants finally turned up for the event. As a result, prize money was cut down – a move that further angered the teams that did come down to Pilani. The major reason behind the fall in participation was a domino effect that began when a student from Lady Shri Ram College refused to attend the event at the last moment because of a prior conflict with a member from Sri Venkateswara College who had a bad reputation amongst certain members of the Delhi University circuit. This prompted many other teams to do the same. News of this leaked out, and due to the fear of a lack of good competition—and an eventual reduction in prize money—some of the more senior teams decided against coming. After the member from Sri Venkateswara College was forced to pull out in order to prevent any more colleges from declining to participate, a total of seven colleges were out of the competition before it had even begun. All this had happened just four days before the fest and so the only thing that DebSoc could do was damage control.

According to Arpit, the large prize money offered here is a major reason why QED works. ‘The main thing to be done after all the participants had arrived was to convince them that everything was under control; even if this is not the QED we had promised two months ago, it is still a tournament that has been going on for six to seven years and has a great reputation in the circuit.’ ‘Hindsight always helps’, Arpit said when asked about what DebSoc could have done differently during the fest. He said that because of clashing schedules—and the immovability of event dates because of it being conducted with APOGEE this year—QED could not attract some of the more famous debating colleges. The CoStAA, however, did not deserve any blame, in Arpit’s opinion, and need not have done anything differently. They were reasonable right from the first meet, where the prize money was negotiated. They gave DebSoc a fair amount of freedom to make QED as they saw fit.

Finally, Arpit was asked what he changes he would make to the next edition of QED. ‘It is upto the second year batch, but my suggestion is that if QED needs to happen next year, it needs to be rebranded and relaunched because this was in many ways not as successful as it should have been.’