Chaturvedi elected TTFI president

Lucknow, March 19 (IANS): Prabhat Chandra Chaturvedi was elected president of the Table Tennis Federation of India (TTFI) at its annual general meeting here, replacing jailed politician Ajay Chautala for the top post.

Chaturvedi, a retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer who was the TTFI senior vice-president, succeeds Chautala, whose third and final term according to the sports code ended recently. The politician’s son Dushyant joins the body as senior-vice president.

All officer-bearers were elected unopposed at the elections here Sunday.

Chaturvedi will have Dhanraj Choudhary as secretary-general and Mahinder Pal Singh as treasurer. Choudhary, who took over from Mool Chand Chauhan after his demise three years ago, is in his second term, while Singh replaces V.K. Bawa.

TTFI, which adopted the new sports code in January this year, held elections as per the guidelines set out by the sports ministry. The elections were conducted by returning officer Utthan Kumar Bansal, a retired IPS officer, in the presence of government observer Rachna Govil and Indian Olympic Association (IOA) representative Anandeshwar Pandey.

All office-bearers, including one senior vice-president, eight vice-presidents, four joint secretaries and seven of eight executive council members, were elected unanimously. The posts of one senior vice-president and one EC member have been kept vacant as there were no sufficient nominations. They will be filled later with the due process of election.

Later, when the newly-elected members met, they decided on the annual calendar of events and drew up a bid chart from various state affiliates. As per agreement from state units, the senior nationals will be held in Bihar, while the youth and junior nationals in Assam and the cadet and sub-junior nationals in Rajasthan.

Punjab (north), Andhra Pradesh (south), North Bengal (east) and Maharashtra (west) will conduct the zonals. All these domestic events will see a total prize purse of Rs.50 lakh being disbursed to the paddlers up to the top eight places.

But the most immediate and biggest event on TTFI calendar is the Commonwealth TT Championships to be held in New Delhi May 5-10. Besides the Commonwealth championships, the TTFI will also host two more international events in ITF Global Circuit event in October (Maharashtra) and South Asian championships (July-August) this year.

The office-bearers: Prabhat Chandra Chaturvedi (president), Dushyant Chautala (senior vice-president), DV Sundar, Rajeev P Bodas, SM Sultan, Sanjay Singh, Majinder Singh Sirsa, Sudhanshu Pandey, Arun Kumar Banerjee, and Chiranjib Choudhury (all vice-presidents), Dhanraj Choudhary (secretary-general), Mahinder Pal Singh (treasurer), Haresh Sangtani, Mantu Ghosh, Jayesh Acharya and Tridip Duvarah (all joint secretaries), Jhanja Tripathy, Srinivasan Shridhar, TH. Nandkishore Singh, Yatin Tipnis, Manjit Dua, Pankaj Sharma, Vivek Satyajeet, and Vijayarangam (all EC members).