NEWS
SCHEDULES
COLUMNS
PREVIOUS TOURS
OTHER SPORTS
STATISTICS
INTERVIEWS
SLIDE SHOW
ARCHIVES

Rediff Shopping

Shop & gift from thousands of products!   Books     Music       Apparel   Jewellery   Flowers   More..      Safe Shopping

Mass falsification of ages in Nat TT

Suresh Parekh in Rajkot

Falsification of age in various categories was the talking point of the opening day of the National ranking table tennis tournament, in Rajkot on Thursday, which saw as many as 30 players being scratched from the competition for altering dates on their birth certificates.

Among them were Saptaparni Guha and Shinjini Mitra, two leading players from Bengal, who were seeded in the girls' section.

M Lele, chief referee of the tournament, said the Table Tennis Federation of India will take a final decision on the two players later in the day but confirmed that both will lose their seeding as well as daily allowance.

Lele said when Shinjini Mitra sent in her entry the birth date read 28-4-84. However, when she reported for the tournament, her birth certificate showed she was born on 28-4-85. Saptaparni Guha too registered her date of birth as 3-8-84 and then altered it to 13-8-85 in order to stay in the lower age group.

It was also revealed that most of the birth certificates submitted were not original. According to a TTFI official, at least 75 per cent of the certificates suggested that the players were born in the first three months of the year, perhaps in order to avoid playing in a higher age group.

The ugly episode was a damper on the first day's proceedings which featured the boys' and girls' singles. All the big names made it to the quarter-finals without much trouble.

Meanwhile, the seedings for the men's and women's singles were announced. S. Raman was given the pride of place in the men's singles while Mouma Das got the top billing among the women.