There were tears in his eyes, not of any trouble, but of happiness. Similar tears dripped from his eyes last year when his daughter was successful in winning the gold medal in Commonwealth Games. Behind the success of Nitu Ghangas is the biggest hero behind the scenes Jai Bhagwan, who took three years of unpaid leave from Haryana Vidhan Sabha to make his daughter a world champion to muster all possible facilities to reach the destination. He has not been re-instated to his job to his job yet.
When Neetu was 14 years old, she failed to win a medal in the Haryana State Boxing Championship. Jai Bhagwan was unable to bear the discontent in the eyes of Nitu. He took his daughter to Bhiwani Boxing Academy, where she came under the wings of coach Jagdish. This is the same Jagdish under whose coaching Vijender won the country’s its first boxing medal at the Beijing Olympics. “This academy was about 20 kilometers away from my village Dhanana. I used to take Nitu every morning at five on his bike. This went on in the evening as well. As long as the practice went on, I used to watch game and the rest of the boxers closely.
With a total of five hours of practice in morning and evening, I could sense maturity in her game. She won gold medal in Haryana State Boxing in the following year by defeating international boxer Jyoti Gulia. Jyoti also became world champion in youth later. Nitu defeated Jyoti again in the trials of the World Youth Championship. This gave us hopes that she could be a future champion. Nitu’s confidence increased a lot after winning the gold in this tournament. She went on to win gold medals in Asian and World Youth championships in 2018 but next year Neetu’s pace seemed to slow down a bit due to shoulder injury in the Senior category of State championship. For this reason, she could not participate in the National Championship of 2018.
Jai Bhagwan tells that today Nitu is running the house. She is a class one officer in the Reserve Bank of India.
She is taking care of her younger sister’s MBBS expenses. Together they encourage her younger brother in the 10m air pistol event.
