Sports
oi-Gaurav Sharma
The National Sports Awards 2025 will honour athletes, coaches, and organisations for their extraordinary achievements and contributions to Indian sports. Interestingly, this year’s awards do not have a winner of the country’s highest sporting award, the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award.
Besides, the Arjuna Awards have this year’s maximum number of recipients from Olympic, para, and other sports.
The National Sports Awards 2025 honoured 17 Arjuna Award recipients for outstanding performance across sports, but notably no Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award winner was selected this year. Winners for the Dronacharya Award and the Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Puraskar (Army Paralympic Node, Pune) were also announced by a committee chaired by Justice (Retd.) Arun Kumar Mishra.
Seventeen sportspersons have received the Arjuna Awards for their outstanding performance in Sports and Games 2025. The awardees belong to athletics, badminton, boxing, chess, deaf shooting, hockey, kabaddi, para shooting, para athletics, rowing, and shooting.
Arjuna Award 2025 winners
The winners of the Arjuna Award 2025 are:
- Tejaswin Shankar – Athletics
- Muhammed Ajmal V – Athletics
- Priyanka Goswami – Athletics
- Treesa Jolly – Badminton
- Pullela Gayatri Gopichand – Badminton
- Narender – Boxing
- Vidit Santosh Gujarathi – Chess
- Divya Jitendra Deshmukh – Chess
- Dhanush Srikanth – Deaf shooting
- Lalremsiami – Hockey
- Rajkumar Pal – Hockey
- Surjeet – Kabaddi
- Pooja – Kabaddi
- Rudransh Khandelwal – Para-shooting
- Ekta Bhyan – Para-athletics
- Arvind Singh – Rowing
- Akhil Sheoran – Shooting
- Footballer I Arumainayagam has been chosen for the Arjuna Award (Lifetime) for his contributions to the growth and development of football.
Dronacharya Award 2025 winners
The winners of the Dronacharya Award 2025 are:
In the regular category: Parveer Singh (Athletics), Chhote Lal Yadav (Boxing), and Neha Nandkumar Chavan (Shooting).
In the lifetime category: Dharmendra Singh Yadav (Boxing) and Virender Kumar (Wrestling).
Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Puraskar 2025
The Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Puraskar 2025 has only one winner, the Army Paralympic Node, Pune, for its remarkable contributions to promoting and developing sports.
The list of awardees has been recommended by a committee chaired by the former Supreme Court judge Justice (Retd.) Arun Kumar Mishra. The committee consists of eminent sportspersons, sports administrators, and professionals from the field of sports journalism. The applications for the awards were invited through an online portal, and the committee received a good number of applications for consideration.
