1975 Hockey Triumph Ranks Below C’wealth Medal In Ministry Guidelines

Chennai: Already in a shambles, Indian hockey seems to get the cold shoulder even from the administrators and the Government. How else would you explain the Ministry of Railways’ three-decade-old indecision on the allocation of rail passes to five members of the 1975 World Cup winning hockey squad?

It is indeed a crying shame that the ministry has adopted double standards while applying qualifying criteria for sportspersons eligible for privileges. In hockey , triumph at the World Cup — an inarguably more difficult field than the the Asian Games or Commonwealth Games — is not considered good enough to warrant the rail pass privilege. As a result, Brigadier HJS Chimni, Ashok Dewan and Leslie Fernandez, Omkar Singh and PE Kalaiah, members of the 1975 squad that won the title, have been ignored for the rail passes while nine members from the same squad earned the privilege by virtue of their presence in the bronze medal-winning Indian squad in the 1972 Olympics.

Strangely, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, while replying to information sought by Augustine Roy Rozario, president of Chennai’s Anglo-Indian Aassociation, under the RTI Act was not in a position to say whether a bronze medal secured in hockey was more valuable than a World Cup gold. Its reply was as evasive as ever. “The information is being collected from ad-hoc committee, hockey .”

The Railway ministry has granted rail passes to Arjuna Awardees, Olympic medallists, gold medallists in Asian and Commonwealth Games. In 1997, the ministry also added Dronacharyas and Rajiv Khel Ratna awardees to the list of beneficiaries and yet, the World Cup was not good enough to get the nod.

“It is not just the pass that is a bone of contention,” says Leslie Fernandez, goalkeeper of the 1975 squad. “Being an exrailway employee, I already have the railway pass but how can the authorities frame such a system where World Cup is deemed less important than Asian Games or Commonwealth Games medal? Such a double standard could spill over to sportspersons in all disciplines,” he reasons.

The Government’s double standards is also evident when the pensions to medallists in various disciplines decided by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports are compared, making it a clear case of mismatch between the standards set by two ministries. The sports ministry, in another reply to Rozario’s question under RTI Act said, that the “gold medallists of Commonwealth/Asian Games are entitled for a pension of Rs 7000 per month and the gold medallists of World Cup of any tournament including hockey , are entitled for a pension of Rs 8000 per month.”

The RTI application also sought the details of MPs recommending the case of the World Cup winning players to the Railway ministry and the reply mentioned that between 2006 and 2007, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, A Krishna Swamy and Francis Fanthome wrote to the ministry regarding the status of the five players.

The ministry’s reply underlined the point, “it is not feasible to expand the scope of existing scheme to include World Cup winners due to financial and other repurcussion.” It is indeed shocking that the financial angle has been highlighted because the World Cup victory remains the lone one in Indian hockey history, and even then only five remain to be considered while 33 Dronacharyas got the privilege since 1997.