CHENNAI: A permanent government job continues to elude J Deepa, a para-athlete with locomotor disability from Madurai who has won several international medals and was honoured with the Kalpana Chawla Award by the DMK government led by M Karunanidhi in 2010.
She is works as a visiting coach with the Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu (SDAT) on a monthly honorarium of `20,000. Deepa, now 43, staged a protest outside the secretariat demanding the promised job on Wednesday.
She has won a silver medal in the 2004 Belgian Paralympic Championships, a bronze at the 2005 International Open German Athletics Championships, and multiple medals at the national-level.
She had appealed to the DMK government in 2010 for a government job as an athletics coach. Later, in 2022, Udhayanidhi Stalin, who handles the sports development portfolio, announced in the Assembly that she would be given a job.
“When I applied for the SDAT coaches’ recruitment in 2022, I was not issued a hall ticket, citing I did not possess a National Institute of Sports diploma,” she said.
She then completed the course and applied for the recent recruitment in January, but she was denied a hall ticket as she was “found ineligible under the roster system”, as her community category was mapped to a specific disability category that did not match hers.
Senior officials said it was unfortunate that Deepa was found ineligible to appear for the exam. They added the authority would do its best to support her and noted she has been associated with SDAT for several years.