Subodh Malla Barua of Dainik Assam and A Vinod of The Hindu were today unanimously elected as president and secretary of the Sports Journalists' Federation of India (SJFI) at its annual general meeting here.
The meeting also decided to confer honorary membership to legendary athletes Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, Geet Sethi, Michael Ferriera, Chuni Goswami and P T Usha considering their contribution to sport and sport journalism thereafter through their columns over a long period of time.
The Telengana Sports Journalists' Association was inducted as a member of the SJFI, given the constitutional change in the State of Andhra Pradesh over a couple of years ago.
The meeting also decided that the 39th annual convention of the SJFI and the J K Bose Twenty20 cricket tournament will be held in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, from September 14 to 18. The 40th edition of the event was alloted to Indore (2017) and the 41st edition to Bengaluru (2018).
The new SJFI office-bearers (2016-18) are:
President: Subodh Malla Barua (Dainik Asam, Guwahati)
Vice-Presidents: Saraju Chakraborty (Syandan Patrika Agartala), D V Garud (Kannada Prabha, Bengaluru), Dharmendra Pant (PTI Basha, New Delhi), Kishor Bagde (Lokmat, Nagpur)
Secretary: A Vinod (The Hindu, Thiruvananthapuram)
Joint secretary: R Kaushik (www.Wisdenindia.Com, Bengaluru)
Treasurer: Prasanth Keni (Loksatta, Mumbai)
Executive committee: R Naryanan (The Hindu, Chennai), Vikas Pandey (Agniban, Indore), Abhishek Sengupta (Ei Samay, Kolkata), Bidyut Kalita (Asamiya Pratidin, Guwahati), Amitabha Das Sharma (The Hindu, Kolkata), S S Ramaswamy (PTI, Mumbai) Sambit Mohapatra (Nirbhay, Bhubaneswar), Manuja Veerappa (Times of India, Bengalauru), Devendra Pandey (The Indian Express, Mumbai).
