HI, IHF given 21 days to submit proposal

By Mihir Vasavda | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA

The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) and sports ministry have given the two warring hockey bodies, Hockey India (HI) and Indian Hockey Federation (IHF), 21 days to come out with a fresh proposal to form a joint body.

Faced with the prospect of India’s hockey team being ousted from the race to the Olympics, the sports ministry held a meeting on Friday with the three other parties, but it failed to resolve the crisis.

Sources said the meeting was a fiery affair, considering that HI and IHF came into it on the back of several heated exchanges in the last one week. Soon after emerging from the meeting, a peeved HI secretary-general Narendra Batra said the temporary power-sharing arrangement reached between both the federations at the behest of the ministry was over.

He made it clear that HI will not present any new proposal to IOA and would stick to the 10-point agenda made by the government. “We will reply to the FIH before November 1 deadline, but the working agreement reached on July 25 at the ministry’s intervention has ended,” he said. “We will not present any new proposal. We have already made our stand clear and we will stick to that.”

IHF president RK Shetty, however, said they will formulate a fresh proposal and present it to the IOA and the ministry.

Apart from Batra and Shetty, the meeting was also attended by the ministry’s joint-secretary, Rahul Bhatnagar, KPS Gill, Ashok Mathur and Amrit Bose (all from IHF), Rajeev Mehta (Hockey India) and RK Anand (IOA).