Manika Batras career-graph has seen a steady rise since her induction into the core group of the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi last October. With her consistent performance over a period of time,she achieved what no other Indian women player has ever ever done-reaching the highest world ranking of 184 as per the ITTF rankings list released last week. Before Manika,two other women players had come under the 200-bracket with Poulomi Ghatak and Mouma Das reaching their best world rankings during the peak of their careers. Yet Poulomi,now ranked 253,and Mouma currently at 226,never managed to go under 190. Their best rankings happened to be No. 196 and No. 192,in that order. However,Manikas accomplishment has come as a shot in the arm for the Table Tennis Federation of India (TTFI). It has recommended to the sports ministry that a five-member team be sent to Sweden to train at the Peter Karlsson academy for a month before the Bahrain world championships in November. The ministerys go-ahead could be coming before too long,said TTFI secretary-general Dhanraj Choudhary here on Monday. Choudhary further added that three other juniors Soumyajit Ghosh,Harmeet Desai and Mallika Bhandarkar who had been chosen for a six-month scholarship at the academy by the ITTF some time ago will be leaving for Sweden on October 8. We want the other five juniors-Manika,world No. 28,Ankita Das (92),Reeth Rishya (224) and two boys Sourav Saha (109) and G. Sathyan (48)-to join them and prepare together for the world juniors for a month. Hence we have requested the ministry to clear their trip at government cost, said Choudhary. The TTFI secretary-general,however,admitted that Indias No. 1 player Achanta Sharath Kamal,has not had a good year with injuries and some other problems. He had reached the best ranking of No. 39,but sadly is now at No. 75. But we hope Sharath,with vast experience to boot,can regain his spot, said Choudhary. As for the other members of themens team,except for the juniors who have broken into the senior section,the rest like Amal Raj (246),Subhajit Saha,Soumyadeep Roy have also gone down a notch in their rankings. But there is a silver lining apart from the juniors as Cadet boys and girls Abhishekh Yadav (No. 33),Utkarsh Gupta (82),K.S. Poorthy (58) and Maria Rony (92) have shown tremendous improvement,he said.
