Gagan Narang and Heena Sidhu among 27 shooters named for Commonwealth Games

The National Rifle Association of India (NRAI), on Monday, announced the 27 member shooting squad for the upcoming 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. The number of maximum participants for the Shooting event from a single country has been reduced from 30 to 27 by the Organising Committee of the games.

India had sent a 30 member shooting squad to Glasgow in 2014 which managed to bag 17 medals. There will be 9 men’s and 8 women’s events in the three disciplines of rifle, pistol, and shotgun that have been scheduled to take place at the Belmont Shooting Centre in Brisbane from April 8 to 14.

Jitu Rai and Apurvi Chandela were the stars last time as they bagged the gold medals in their respective disciplines at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow while Gagan Narang, Heena Sidhu, Shreyasi Singh, and Sanjeev Rajput had won the silver medals in their respective categories.

"We have gone strictly by performance and merit as usual. For the Commonwealth Games, given the reduced quotas it was tough to have to leave out a few shooters who had shot consistently well over the considered period and we went for consistent top ranks across multiple events," NRAI President Raninder Singh told PTI.

“We believe we have a quality squad to match up and even better our performances of yesteryears. There are some exciting and extremely talented youngsters who will rub shoulders with established seniors and I am sure they will come out better with the experience."

Men squad : Sanjeev Rajput, Chain Singh,Gagan Narang, Ravi Kumar, Deepak Kumar, Anish, Neeraj Kumar, Jitu Rai, Om Prakash Mitharwal, Manavjit Singh Sandhu,   Kynan Chenai, Mohd Asab, Ankur Mittal Skeet: Smit Singh, Sheeraj Sheikh.

Women squad : consists of Anjum Moudgil, Tejaswini Sawant, Apurvi Chandela, Mehuli Ghosh, Heena Sidhu, Annuraj Singh, Manu Bhaker, Shreyasi Singh, Seema Tomar, Varsha Varman, Saniya Sheikh and Maheshwari Chauhan.