Ministry reaching out to NSFs, plans for Olympics among discussions

Sports secretary R.S. Jhulaniya will be meeting representatives from the federations via video conference. This will be the second round of virtual meetings that have been held in the lockdown as Jhulaniya met representatives of 13 federations before this.

Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) secretary Vinod Tomar said that the meetings are part of routine virtual discussions that have been taking place across the board. The WFI was part of the first batch of NSFs that met with Jhulaniya last week.

"It was mostly about us explaining how we plan on making our ACTC (Annual Calendar for Training and Competition) and till when we can submit it," Tomar told IANS. "From our end we expressed our desire for India to host as many international competitions in the future whenever normalcy returns."

"There was also discussions on what we plan for preparations for the Olympics. Apart from that there was general discussions on what difficulties different NSFs are facing," said Tomar.

The global sporting calendar for 2020, the first half of which were tournaments that served as build-up to the Tokyo Olympics, has been thrown into disarray due to the coronavirus pandemic and the restriction on people's movements that have been placed in most countries around the world to arrest its alarming spread. The Olympics itself has been postponed to next year.