The Sports Authority of India has taken a landmark decision to promote 12 chief coaches across SAI centres in the country to the position of a High Performance Coach. This is a part of a cadre restructuring and the pay will be in the scale given to Director, Government of India.

Notable coaches and former athletes took to twitter to share their thoughts on the step taken. “In a historical move, 12 SAI coaches have been promoted as High Performance coaches, that is equal to the level Director (GOI) because of restructuring done in SAI. Thank you for this amazing step,” wrote former Olympian boxer Akhil Kumar, tagging the Union Sports Minister Shri Anurag Singh Thakur, MoS Sports Shri Nisith Pramanik, and the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports.

Nataraju Madaiah, volleyball coach based out of SAI National Centre of Excellence Dharamsala, mentioned, “I would like to thank the DG SAI for taking this tremendous step. It is a huge motivation for the coaches and it feels great to see so many coaches getting the recognition. The development in sports in recent years, starting from the Tokyo Olympics, has been manifold.”

Babul Basumatary, senior Athletics coach at SAI NCOE Guwahati, shared similar sentiments, “I thank SAI for giving me this platform. I’ve been coaching since 1992 and whatever SAI is doing to develop the coaching ecosystem and motivate the existing coaches is outstanding.”

List of coaches promoted as High Performance coach:

Harjinder Singh (Basketball) – SAI training centre Jammu

Babul Basumatary (Athletics) – NCOE Guwahati

Kishore Kumar (Judo) – NSNIS Patiala

Vinod Narayan (Badminton) – SAI Bangalore

Gangaraju TB (Hockey) – STC Kokrajhar

Tankeswari Basumatary (Athletics) - Guwahati

Satpal Singh (Athletics) – STC Kurukshetra

Nataraju Madaiah (Volleyball) – NCOE Dharamsala

PK Brahma (Football) – STC Kokrajhar

Rajinder Kumar (Football) – Chandigarh

Jaswant Singh (Boxing) – Mizoram

Kuldeep Kumar (Boxing) – STC Bhiwani

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NB/OA