CHENNAI: The last time an Indian chess player won the Arjuna Award? 2013. The last time an Indian chess player won the Khel Ratna? 1992. The last time an Indian chess coach won the Dronacharya Award? 2006. It also reveals how the sport has fallen out of favour with the sports ministry. Even though Dronavalli Harika was honoured with the Padma Shri in 2019, the country’s chess stars have largely been conspicuous by their absence during awards season.
Multiple time world champion Viswanathan Anand hopes the Olympiad gold on Sunday will rectify that ‘striking statistic’ of zero Arjuna awards in six years. “It’s quite a striking statistic that there’s been a long time since somebody from chess won an Arjuna or a Dronacharya award.” The dearth of awards might suggest a lack of performance but that isn’t true. In the last six years alone, the country has produced a world champion, multiple Grandmasters as well its first medal (bronze in 2014) at the Olympiad.
Anand, who has won all the above mentioned awards, opined that maybe the sports ministry don’t see chess the way it used to earlier. “I would say the last few years, there has been a drop off in the attitude of the sports ministry towards chess. I don’t mean this at a personal level, just institutionally, we no longer get awards for international competitions like Commonwealth and Asian (events). They brought in a new code of conduct and our federation has had some difficulty in (following the code).”
But Anand, who was speaking in a Zoom press conference to commemorate India’s Olympiad win, expressed hope that this step-motherly treatment will change soon. “It would be nice to reset this and sometimes the best way to reset this is not to write long letters to concerned people but to have a good result like this. I hope this result will make them look at chess the way they did so many years ago. Several years ago they recognised chess as a sport that we do incredibly well in. I hope with this result, we start coming into (the conversation) the Arjuna and Dronacharya Award.”