Prime Minister Narendra Modi Spoke With 40 Privileged Sportspersons Including Virat Kohli, Sachin Tendulkar & Sourav Ganguly:

On Friday (03-04-2020), Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a video conference with 40 privileged players of the country including India Men’s National team captain Virat Kohli, Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar, BCCI president Sourav Ganguly, Boxing star Mary Kom and many other sportspersons on the ongoing critical situation in the country because of coronavirus.

For the first time, PM Modi has discussed with sports stars since the three weeks lockdown was enforced on 24th March to combat the spreading of the virus.

The other elite sportspersons included Pullela Gopichand, PT Usha, Hima Das, Vishwanathan Anand, PV Sindhu, Bajrang Punia, Virender Sehwag, Rohit Sharma, Cheteshwar Pujara and Yuvraj Singh.

PM Modi tweeted “ Discussed with players through video conferencing on the critical time arising because of Coronavirus. Sports need self-discipline, persistence, teamwork and also a fighting spirit. All these are also needed to fight against coronavirus.”

He also tweeted in another tweet “Starting from sharing fitness related videos, helping the needy & poor people, giving importance on social distancing and donating to PM CARES Fund, our players are doing excellent jobs to make India free from coronavirus.”

Prime Minister Modi also praised the players for bringing fame to the country by their outstanding performances on the field and told them that now all they have a crucial role to play in encouraging the morale of the country and spreading the social distancing message and saying people to follow the guidelines given at the time of lockdown.

Modi also asked the sportspersons to include the following vital five points in their message to people: ‘sankalp’ to fight against the coronavirus pandemic, ‘ sanyam’ to follow social distancing rule, ‘sakaratmakta’ to retain positive, ‘samman’ to respect the leading soldiers in this fight including medical fraternity, the police force, etc and ‘sahyog’ at the individual level and at the national level through donating to PM CARES Fund.

Also, he asked them to give importance to the physical as well as mental fitness and promoting rules released by AYUSH Ministry.

The sportspersons also praised the leadership quality of PM Modi in this difficult situation as per a Press Information Bureau release.