President presents Arjuna Awards; Gayatri Gopichand, Dhanush Srikanth among winners

President Droupadi Murmu gave away the 2025 Arjuna Awards at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Friday, 13 November, and two names on the list belong to Hyderabad: badminton player Pullela Gayatri Gopichand and deaf shooter Dhanush Srikanth.

The ceremony covered 28 honours in all. The awardee list issued with the President’s Secretariat statement shows 18 Arjuna Awards, one of them for lifetime achievement; five Dronacharya Awards for coaches, two in the lifetime category; four Tenzing Norgay National Adventure Awards for 2024; and the Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Puraskar 2025. The Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna, the country’s top sporting honour, was not among the awards on the list.

A second Arjuna for the Gopichand family

Gayatri, born in March 2003, plays women’s doubles with Treesa Jolly, whose name is also on the Arjuna list. Her citation lists three medals: a mixed team silver and a women’s doubles bronze at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games of 2022, and gold with the Indian side at the 2024 Badminton Asia Team Championships in Malaysia.

The trophy is not new to the household. Her father, Pullela Gopichand, was given the same award back in 1999. He went on to receive the Khel Ratna two years later, in 2001, and in 2009, as a coach, the Dronacharya.

Double Deaflympic champion

Born in July 2002, Dhanush Srikanth struck gold twice at the 24th Summer Deaflympics, held in 2022 at Caxias do Sul in Brazil, taking the men’s 10m air rifle title and the mixed team event. He repeated both wins at the 2024 World Deaf Shooting Championships in Hanover, Germany.

One of the coaches honoured at the ceremony has worked with him. Neha Nandkumar Chavan, who coaches shooters, received the Dronacharya Award, and her citation names Dhanush among the shooters she has trained, along with Elavenil Valarivan and Ramita.

Other Arjuna winners included chess players Vidit Gujarathi and Divya Deshmukh, Tejaswin Shankar and Priyanka Goswami from athletics, and hockey players Lalremsiami and Rajkumar Pal. The lifetime Arjuna went to Isaiah Arumainayagam, born in 1942, who played in the Indian football team that won gold at the 1962 Asian Games.

The Army Paralympic Node in Pune, set up in 2017 to train soldiers disabled on duty for para-sports, received the Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Puraskar.