A shared rifle, a fight for a stadium: The making of Baghpat’s 7 Arjuna awardees

At 13, Subhash Verma left Malakpur village for Delhi to train seriously as a wrestler.

Back home, he had an akhara to practise in, but the exposure was limited. In Delhi, he found stronger training partners and more experienced coaches. “The training may be similar, but the people you train with and the coach make a big difference,” Verma, now 61, recalled.

In 1987, he became the first sportsperson from Uttar Pradesh's Baghpat — then part of Meerut — to win the Arjuna Award.

Nearly four decades later, six more sportspersons from the district have followed him: three wrestlers, two shooters and a para-athlete. The latest is 32-year-old shooter Akhil Sheoran, one of 17 sportspersons selected for the award this year.

Sport has been woven into village life, passed down through families, and often seen as a route to securing jobs in the Army, police and paramilitary forces. Former champions have gone on to build academies of their own.

At the same time, the journeys of Baghpat’s Arjuna awardees reveal a limitation: while the district has developed more sporting infrastructure — it now has three stadiums, two of which are fully operational, academies and clubs — athletes seeking specialised coaching, equipment and high-level competition often look to Delhi, Haryana and Punjab.

The Indian Express spoke to the awardees about where they trained, what they found lacking in Baghpat and how they have tried to bridge that gap.

Rural akharas often lacked proper wrestling mats, while some had no roofs and shut during the monsoon and winter. Coaches, too, had limited exposure to modern training methods, he said.

This was behind his decision to set up an akhara of his own in 1998 on a plot he had purchased in Ghaziabad four years earlier.

He said the location, along the Saharanpur-Delhi highway in Loni, was easily accessible to wrestlers from Baghpat and neighbouring districts, where they could train and stay for free. The facility has since received support from the Sports Authority of India, which has provided a coach and wrestling mats, he said.

For Shokendra Tomar, 45, who received the Arjuna Award in 2004, the lack of facilities became a personal campaign.

In 2008, Tomar offered to auction his medals and awards to raise money for wrestling mats and land for a stadium, and staged a protest in the district. Officials subsequently assured him that a stadium would be built, he claimed, and Baghpat got one in 2014.

But the 36-acre sports complex has since fallen into disrepair owing to poor maintenance, he claimed, adding, "The wrestling hall has remained closed for years and, at times, has been used for kabaddi."

Tomar said wrestlers from villages still travel to Delhi — like he did — because local facilities lack proper mats, gyms and qualified coaches. They also have limited access to information about nutrition, modern training techniques and changes in the sport. “If the infrastructure is good, coaches will also come,” he said.

Tomar’s own story also shows how strongly the culture of sport is rooted in families.

His family borrowed money to meet his training and living expenses. His brother, Parvinder Tomar, travelled nearly 60 km every day for 10 years to bring him five litres of milk from home.

“He brought the milk every day, including Sundays. Every member of the family contributed,” Tomar said.

A former Northern Railways employee, he worked as a chief ticket inspector in Delhi. Tomar now lives at his ancestral home in Baghpat.