As dark clouds of officialdom loom over Indian hockey, there are some who provide the silver lining

Prasad: Funded a team of tribal girls with his PF

During those heady days of Asiad ‘82, a middle-aged villager from Bihar joined the mass exodus from across the country for the 15-day sporting pilgrimage to the Capital. Brij Nandan Prasad was born in a remote village in Nalanda district but his job as a junior engineer with Heavy Engineering Corporation gave him the resources to travel and watch world-class athletes in action.
Prasad went for a few football games — a sport that had a decent following in his village — but it was fast-paced action on astro-turf that got him hooked to hockey. While watching the Indian women winning the gold, the man in late 30s at that time was troubled by the fact that there were no tribal girls from his region in the squad. “I had seen so many girls from tribal villages play hockey in schools in Ranchi and I knew they were good enough. And so I was troubled,” he says. That question changed his life and he was on the arduous road to hockey officialdom.
Prasad started the Bihar Women’s Hockey Association (BWHA) around two-and-a-half decades back and today Prasad, 65, has made the question that came up in his mind in early ’80s irrelevant. In fact, these days he comes across a different query: How come there are so many tribal girls in the Indian team?
With the formation of Jharkhand, BWHA got a name change but the assembly line of national level players that Prasad started hasn’t stopped. “About 50 girls have played for India and there are countless who have a job because of hockey,” he says.

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