One thousand and seventy-five archers. That is the entry list for the 3rd NTPC National Ranking Archery Tournament 2026, which has been under way at the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board Sports Stadium in Katra since 13 September and runs to 21 September.
It is a national ranking event — the kind that decides where an archer sits in the country's pecking order — and it is being shot roughly an hour from Jammu city, in front of anyone who turns up.
What has been shot so far
The junior leg opened on 16 September with 260 archers: 68 in Recurve Boys, 44 in Recurve Girls, 100 in Compound Boys and 92 in Compound Girls. The top sixteen juniors in each gender were in the field, several of them international-level competitors.
The junior finals were decided on 17 September.
Compound Women — Kumud Saini (Delhi) gold, Sandiya (Uttar Pradesh) silver, Ekta Rani (Haryana) bronze
Compound Men — Mohit Dagar (Haryana) first, Gurekamveer Singh (Punjab) second, Gourav Virender Singh Jakhar (Rajasthan) third
Recurve Women — Khushi Kumari (Jharkhand) first, Sharvari Somnath Shende (Maharashtra) second, Jannat (Haryana) third
Recurve Men — Rudra Kumar (Delhi) first, Goldi Mishra (Jharkhand) second, Adrita Ghosh (Assam) third
No J&K archer is named in the published junior results. That is worth saying plainly rather than implying there were none — the reports carry the podium places and nothing below them, so a J&K finish outside the top three would not appear either way.
Sheetal Devi was there
Sheetal Devi, the para-archer from Kishtwar, attended the junior opening on 16 September. She has had a considerable few weeks — she topped qualification at the Ahmedabad Para Series with 698 out of 720, and took her first individual Para Series gold shortly after.
Her presence at a junior event is not incidental. Sheetal came out of exactly this system, and a national ranking round in Katra is the closest most young J&K archers will get to seeing what the level above them actually looks like.
Who is running it
The tournament is organised by the Archery Association of J&K under the Archery Association of India and the J&K Sports Council, with the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board providing the venue. The association's president Vikram Singh, general secretary Sunil Sharma and District Reasi Archery Association president Arun Sharma have been in attendance, alongside SP Katra Kameshwar Puri and Katra MLA Baldev Raj Sharma as chief guests on the 16th and 17th.
That chain matters if you are an archer rather than a spectator. The Archery Association of J&K is the body you have to go through to be entered in a ranking tournament at all — affiliation runs district association to state association to national federation, and an individual cannot simply enter.
What a "ranking" tournament actually decides
The word does a lot of work and is easy to misread. A national ranking tournament is not a championship — nobody leaves it as national champion. It is a points event: performances across a season's ranking rounds build a national order of merit, and that order is what feeds selection trials for international teams and for the squads that go to continental and world events.
That is why the entry list runs to 1,075 rather than a neat bracket of qualifiers. Ranking events are deliberately open at the bottom and brutal at the top. An archer from a district association can enter alongside someone who has shot for India, and the scoreboard sorts it out.
It also explains the age-group structure. This meet is running separate legs, of which the junior leg — 260 archers over 16 and 17 September — is only one. The exact days for the senior and cadet legs across the 13 to 21 September window were not published in the reports available, so check with the Archery Association of J&K before travelling for a specific category.
Going to watch
The tournament runs to 21 September at the Shrine Board Sports Stadium in Katra. Katra is about 45 minutes to an hour from Jammu by road, and the train to Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Katra station puts you in the town itself.
If you have never watched competitive archery, the format is worth knowing in advance: ranking rounds are long and quiet, and the head-to-head eliminations are where it becomes watchable. Compound and recurve are genuinely different sports to look at — compound bows use a release aid and a magnified sight and are shot at a smaller ten-ring, recurve is the Olympic discipline shot with fingers.
Why Katra keeps getting these
The Shrine Board's sports stadium is one of the few venues in the Jammu region that can hold a field of a thousand-plus competitors with the space an archery range needs, and the town has the hotel capacity to house them. That combination is rare here, and it is why national-level events keep landing in Katra rather than Jammu city.
For a young archer in the Jammu belt, the practical takeaway is smaller and more useful than the headline numbers: the people who select for J&K were all in one place this week, and they will be again.
Sources: Daily Excelsior — junior leg begins · Daily Excelsior — junior leg concludes
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