Anil Jain elected AITA president, Dhupar secretary-general

New Delhi, Sep 6 (IANS) Rajya Sabha member Anil Jain has been elected as the president of the All India Tennis Association (AITA) at its Annual General Meeting (AGM) held on Sunday in New Delhi. Madhya Pradesh Tennis Association Secretary Anil Dhupar has been elected as secretary general.

All the posts of office-bearers as well as the Executive Committee members were filled without the need for a contest and contestants were declared elected unopposed.

While Jain, who is the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) National Secretary, replaces Praveen Mahajan as AITA President, Dhupar comes in place of Hironmoy Chatterjee as secretary-general. India’s Davis Cup non-playing captain Rohit Rajpal, who was recently elected as Delhi Lawn Tennis Association (DLTA) president for a second term, takes over as treasurer of AITA.

Former player and Tamil Nadu Tennis Association president Vijay Amritraj has been elected as a vice-president alongwith Chatterjee, Chintan Parikh, Navneet Sehgal, Anil Khanna, Bharat Oza, CS Sunder Raju and Rajan Kashyap.

Premkumar Karra, Raktim Saikia, Suman Kapur and Sunder Iyer have been elected as Joint Secretaries. Meanwhile, Akhouri B Prasad, Aneil Mahajan, Ankush Dutta, Ashok Kumar, Gurucharan Singh Hora, Murti Gupta and Thomas Paul make up the Executive Committee.

Jain, in his inaugural address, proposed setting up a High-Performance Tennis Academy in Delhi. “In collaboration with the AITA Trust, the Delhi Lawn Tennis Association and with support from the Govt, we propose to set up the High-Performance Tennis Academy in Delhi which will be a residential training centre for excellence.

“The primary aim would be to bring together and create a pool of our top junior players and provide them with the best possible training, coaching, nutrition, mental training and every other support to help our most talented and promising juniors to break into the top 30 in the Junior Category in the world,” said Jain.

“We shall be actively pursuing all possible financial and other support from the Government as well as Corporates to help get the Academy project and all of AITA’s initiatives off the ground at the earliest.

“In the short term, with support from all of the stakeholders, AITA must try and mitigate the Covid-19 impact on its tournament-structure and bring the sport back to pre-Covid levels at the earliest possible. And from there on, we have to work hard on improving further in all aspects of the sport.”

–IANS

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