Jamshedpur, Dec. 14: In a bid to strengthen the supply of athletes and players to the national teams, Tata Steel will focus on bringing “more value addition” to its sports academies.

The proposal was decided three athletes — Sinimol Paulose, Chitra K. Soman and Jayant Talukdar — bagged medals at the ongoing 15th Asian Games at Doha. Officials the academies run by the steel company are ecstatic after the wins.

“Yes, the efforts of Sinimol, Chitra and Jayant have certainly make us confident and inspired us to do something positive. We’ll implement more value additions in the three academies run by us,” Satish Pillai, the chief of sports at Tata Steel told The Telegraph.

Pillai said 16 current and former athletes they trained are members of national athletics, archery and football squads at the Asian Games.

“This signifies that our efforts are on the right track. We’ll try to feed more top-notch athletes to the Indian contingents,” he added.

Nine former cadets of the Tata Football Academy — Subrata Paul, Subhashish Roy Choudhury, Surkumar Singh, Subhas Chakravorty, Syed Rahim Nabi, Habib-ur-Rehman Mandol, Debabrata Roy, Gourmangi Singh and Chandan Chitra Sen — have donned the Indian colours at the Doha meet.

Other Tata-trained sportspersons at the meet include Diwakar Prasad (boxing), Dola Banerjee, Reena Kumari, Chekrowolu Swuro and Talukdar (archery) as well as Paulose and Soman (athletics).

“This is a momentous occasion for Tata Sports Academies. Cadets from the athletics academy, the football academy, archery and boxing represented India in several events at Doha Asian Games 2006 and brought glory to the nation,” said a spokesman.

Referring to the value additions panned, sports officials said more focus would be given to help cadets with more advanced forms of training.

“Emphasis will also be on giving them the latest equipment and training them under experienced coaches. Efforts would also be made to send some cadets for training stints abroad. Exposure to such destinations would bring a lot of improvement to their skills. Though we are sending football and archery cadets for training abroad, the frequency of the trips would be more in the coming years,” an official said.