Chaturvedi elected TTFI president; Bihar to host Senior National Table Tennis Tournament

New Delhi, March 19, 2013: Prabhat C. Chaturvedi was elected as president of the Table Tennis Federation of India (TTFI) at the Annual General Meeting held at Lucknow on Sunday for a four-year term (2013-2017). Chaturvedi, a retired IAS officer was the senior vice-president of the federation, and he replaces Ajay Singh Chautala, whose third term at the helm ended recently.

The new president, who assumed charge at the TTFI, will have Dhanraj Choudhary as secretary-general and Mahinder Pal Singh as treasurer, the two other principal office-bearers of the federation. Choudhary, who took over from Mool Chand Chouhan after his demise three years ago, is in his second term, while Singh, a first-timer, replaces B.K. Bawa, as treasurer.

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

All office-bearers, including one senior vice-president, eight vice-presidents, four joint secretary and seven out 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 in 2013. 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 between May 5 and 10. According to the secretary-general, the TTFI has already started chalked out plans to conduct the prestigious championships in a big way. 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 C. Chaturvedi (President), Dushyant Chautala (Senior vice-president), DV Sundar, Rajeev P Bodas, S M 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). 

Press release