School students may still be a few years away from exercising their voting rights, but that didn’t stop them from confidently voicing their opinions on current affairs during a three-day Diplomacy Summit that concluded at St Xavier’s School in Doranda on Sunday.

About 250 students from 15 schools — one from Bokaro and the rest from Ranchi — took part in the event.

“Public speaking is gaining prominence because it equips students with better communication skills and maturity to handle difficult issues,” chief coordinator of the event, San-geeta Chitlangia, had said at the start of the summit on Friday.

During the summit, the students, divided into groups, deliberated on various topics like it happens during sessions in Parliament and other international forums and presented their recommendations on the last day.

The participants engaged in debates on topical subjects like national security concerns post Pulwama attack, electoral reforms and countering threat from transnational insurgent groups during mock sessions of Parliament and general assembly of the United Nations , a stakeholders’ meet and an all-India political parties’ meeting.

“We recommended that peace talks should be encouraged to be held between conflicting or affected nations and peace treaties signed so that the world becomes a better place to live in,” said Suchit Raj, a Class X standard student of St Xavier’s School who was in a group that discussed countering threat from transnational insurgency groups in the mock UN general assembly session.

Suchit’s classmate Ahaskar Kashyap said they also discussed the effect of insurgency on youth.

At the mock joint parliamentary session, the students debated two bills that were passed by the Lok Sabha in the last winter session, but are yet to become Acts.

One of those bills — The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016 — that bans commercial surrogacy, but allows surrogacy for couples who cannot have children..

The other bill, The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill 2016, aims at defining transgender people and proposes an Act seeking end to the discrimination faced by them in the country.

An executive board, comprising people associated with the study of law or legal practice, oversaw the proceedings of the summit.