The Sports Authority of India's Mission Olympic Cell (MOC) on Thursday included Men's and Women's hockey team in the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS) along with various other athletes.
The MOC meeting was held today to select the athletes. Other athletes come from five different sports namely: Shooting, Archery, Para-Athletics, Para-Archery and Para-Badminton.
In shooting Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar, Mairaj Ahmed Khan, Tejaswini Sawant, Chinki Yadav have been included while form Archery, Deepika Kumari, Ankita Bhakat, Bombayla Devi were included.
Vivek Chikara, Harvinder Singh, Rakesh Kumar and Shyam Sundar have been named from the Para-Archery. From Para-Athletics Nishad Kumar, Ajeet Singh, Yogesh Kathuniya, T Mariyappan were included. Nagar Krishna was the only Para-Badminton player to be included in TOPS.
Also, Indian men's javelin throw athletes Shivpal Singh and Rohit Yadav have been included in the developmental group.
TOPS is a flagship program of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports which is a scheme to provide assistance to India's top athletes.
The committee has also taken the decision to exclude shooters Ravi Kumar and Om Prakash Mitharwal from the TOPS due to their dipping performance graph. Apart from them, boxer Neeraj Phogat has also been excluded from the TOPS scheme due to her provisional suspension by NADA.
Besides the inclusion of athletes, financial proposals to the tune of more than 40 lakhs were approved for athletes from shooting, table tennis, wrestling and para-athletics.
( With inputs from ANI )