Netball is among the 17 disciplines in which medals will be handed out at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, but it’s still some distance from being considered a serious sport in the country. For now, they’ve at least managed to make one of the prerequisites to being tagged ‘serious’ — internal bickering within the governing body.

The Netball Federation of India (NFI), which oversees a discipline that’s relatively irrelevant in the scheme of Indian sport, has seen high levels of activity over the last couple of weeks — and we’re not just talking about their first ‘government-sponsored’ overseas tour. The team is scheduled to travel to Hong Kong in two days time, but the real action is closer home, where the president of the association, Gurbir Singh Sandhu, has been deposed by secretary Pritam Singh Sharma.

Sharma, one of the long-standing members of the association, convened a meeting in Delhi on Tuesday and removed Sandhu from his post.

“We have a new president now,” Sharma told The Indian Express, referring to Vagish Pathak, who is also the president of the Delhi unit. Sandhu is currently the president of the Chandigarh unit. While Sharma says the decision to replace Sandhu was a unanimous one taken by the members present at the meeting, Sandhu on his part denies any such development.

Fact or fiction

“There is no way they (Sharma & Co) can nominate or elect a new president at this moment. Since the elections were held in July 2006, only two years of my term have been completed. The elections are due in 2010,” he said.

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