COVID-19: Sharath Kamal, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran to help needy players

Along with Olympian and former junior national champion Neha Aggarwal, India's top two ranked male paddlers veteran Sharath and Sathiyan have decided to fund 100 beneficiaries to help them tide through this tough time.

It will be a one time grant of Rs 10,000 each to all junior players, support staff and coaches across the country who are struggling to meet ends.

"This initiative was championed by myself, Sharath and Neha. Neha was the one who brought us together of course with the back-end support from Go Sports Foundation. So I felt sports was one community where importance was not given and for a lot of them, livelihood is dependent on sport," Sathiyan told IANS from Chennai on Wednesday.

"They are literally finding it difficult to meet ends where sports activities have not resumed and especially in Chennai it's a complete lockdown. People have not been able to earn money without coaching.

"I feel table tennis has given me everything. It's time that I give back to the community. So we thought we would come together. Now it's important we all play as a team," he said.

Talking about the initiative, Sathiyan added: " We are trying to find out 100 beneficiaries. It can be mostly junior athletes, support staff and coaches who are solely dependent on table tennis and their entire livelihood is based on the sport.

"So we are finding out those most vulnerable people in every state and trying to bring up data. Raising funds. We are aiming at 10,000 per person so 100 people will be around 10 lakhs in a month's time. That is the target and I hope we will be able to achieve this target. IANS

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