Delhi High Court urges BFI to include Manju Rani and two others in india's World Boxing Championships squad as reserves

Delhi High Court on Tuesday urged the Boxing Federation of India to include Manju Rani, Shiksha Narwal and Poonam Poonia in the Indian squad for the upcoming World Boxing Championships as a reserve at least after the out-of-favour boxers moved the court a day ago.

The Court also directed the national boxing body to submit the documents on how the performances of boxers were evaluated for the selection to the Indian squad for the World Boxing Championships, which is slated in New Delhi from March 15.

"BFI has been directed to place on record the documents relating to the evaluation of the performance of the players. The Hon'ble Court has also directed the BFI to consider keeping the Petitioners as reserve players if there is a provision for the same," said BFI in a statement on Tuesday.

The BFI earlier picked a 12-member team for the Worlds, with nine of the boxers in the team were national champions, as per its news selection policy.

The policy, under the supervision of High-performance director Bernard Dunne, and women's chief coach Bhaskar Bhatt, took into account boxers' performance during training and sparring sessions and awarded points over a span of three weeks.

Manju finished behind Nitu Ghanghas, who picked 634 points in comparison to Manju's 564 while Shiksha and Poonam were second to Preeti and Jaismine Lamboriya in their respective categories.

Manju, Shikhsa and Poonam filed a petition on the basis of being ignored for selection despite being the national champions.

However, BFI's representative informed the Court that BFI stayed true to its selection policy, which was also listed on its official website.

"After inclusion in the National Camp, the players were evaluated on various parameters by the High-Performance Director and National Team Coaches.

"The selection was done without a bias and the team was selected after carefully evaluating players over the weeks at the national camp. The Hon'ble Court refused to interfere with the selection," stated BFI further.