THE Sports Ministry onTuesday decided against bestowing the coveted Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna award on any athlete for the year 2025, while unveiling a significantly pruned list of 17 Arjuna awardees after an unprecedented revaluation of the selection panel’s recommendations made more than six months ago. Hockey star Hardik Singh was considered for the country’s highest sporting honour by the selection panel headed by former Supreme Court Judge Arun Kumar Mishra but eventually fell out of contention. The last time that the country did not have a Khel Ratna was the year 2014. World Cup winning chess player Divya Deshmukh, decathlete and high jumper Tejaswin Shankar and shuttler Gayatri Gopichand were among the 17 sportspersons named for the Arjuna Award on Tuesday. Also on the Arjuna Award list were Grandmaster Vidit Gujrathi, Gayatri Gopichand’s women’s doubles partner Treesa Jolly, Glasgow Commonwealth Games silver-medallist boxer Narender Berwal (+92kg), and young deaf rifle shooter Dhanush Srikanth.

The selection committee this year had recommended 24 names for the Arjuna Award but the ministry approved only 17. The awards were announced following massive delay with the ministry announcing a revaluation process to ensure only worthy names were honoured to “preserve the integrity of the awards.” The 19-year-old Deshmukh is the first Indian woman to win the World Cup. Vidit Gujrathi was part of the goldwinning Indian team at the 2024 Chess Olympiad. Tejaswin Shankar, who won a historic decathlon silver medal in the Asian Games in 2023 and followed it up with a second-place finish in the Asian Championships last year, recently won a pathbreaking bronze in the Commonwealth Games despite battling a knee problem. He was among the athletes who criticised the delay in the announcement of the awards calling it disrespectful towards athletes.