Railways shows red flag to hockey World Cup winners

Chennai: Indian hockey , struggling to stay alive, seems to get the cold shoulder even from the administrators and the government. How else would you explain the Railways ministry’s 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 sports ministry, while replying to information sought by Augustine Roy Rozario, president of Chennai’s Anglo-Indian Association, 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 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.