NEW DELHI: Taking note of the seriousness of the matter, the Delhi High Court on Tuesday asked the Boxing Federation of India (BFI) to produce the evaluation forms of three national champions Manju Rani, Shiksha Narwal and Poonam Poonia, who were rejected for the upcoming Women's World Boxing Championships.
The championships will be held from March 15 to 26 at the Indira Gandhi Sports Complex in Delhi.
The BFI will be hosting the Women’s World Championships for the third time, most ever by any country since the tournament’s inception and a total of 395 boxers, including 12 Indians, from 78 countries have registered so far for the biennial event.
Denying any interim relief to the petitioners, the high court, meanwhile, said if a reserved category player is being maintained by the BFI, the three boxers should be considered for that.
“Let the evaluation forms be produced on Monday,” Justice Prathiba M Singh said.
The high court was hearing the petition by the three boxers whose counsel argued that all the players selected are those who were defeated by the petitioners at the national championships held in December 2022 in Bhopal.
During the hearing, advocate Hrishikesh Baruah, representing the BFI, said winning a gold medal is one of the qualifying criteria. The players are then evaluated at the national camp on the basis of selection criteria for national camps and world championship 2023.
He said the players have been evaluated and their candidature has been rejected.
The judge observed, “The professional boxer has evaluated all of you, I cannot interfere in this.”
The plea said, "...the petitioners have requested the relevant authorities to consider their names for selection in the women's world championship, but they did not get any fruitful results."
According to BFI, the new selection policy for the men's and women's World Championships and the Asian Games was followed to pick the national team and Manju (48kg), Shiksha (54kg) and Poonam (60kg) could not make it to the 12-member side.
According to the new policy, drafted in consultation with High Performance Director (HPD) Bernard Dunne, the boxers underwent an evaluation process for three weeks where they were judged on various parameters.
Nine of the 12 national champions were ranked one and qualified for the marquee event.
Commonwealth Games champion Nitu Ghangas (634), Preeti (623) and CWG bronze medallist Jaismine Lamboria (612) finished ahead of Manju (564), Shiksha (573) and Poonam (567) in the evaluation test and were ranked one.
(With inputs from PTI)
