Indian Railways won the 72nd Senior Men's National Kabaddi Championship in Vadodara. Maharashtra reached the final. Chandigarh and Uttar Pradesh made the semi-finals. And quietly, in the middle of a tournament dominated by the established programmes, a Goa raider named Bhavani Rajput racked up the highest raid-points tally of the entire competition: 58.
The number on its own undersells the achievement. The 72nd Senior Nationals condensed 29 teams into 54 matches across four days at the Sama Indoor Stadium, played at a tempo and intensity that punished raiders who couldn't carry their form across multiple games in the same day. Rajput didn't just survive that schedule — he led the field in the metric most directly tied to attacking output. He out-raided Pankaj Mohite (12 raid points in the final alone for Railways), Aditya Shinde (12 raid points for Maharashtra in the final), and a long roster of PKL-tested names.
That matters because Goa is not one of Indian kabaddi's traditional powerhouses. The team isn't typically among the seeded contenders at the Senior Nationals. For its lead raider to top the tournament's scoring chart is the kind of breakout performance that historically reshapes a player's auction value at the next PKL bidding cycle. Franchises like the Tamil Thalaivas and Bengaluru Bulls have built rosters around exactly this kind of high-volume domestic raider with proven national-tournament ceilings.
The national context also helps Rajput. India's Asian Games preparation is built around senior PKL talent like Naveen Kumar, Arjun Deshwal and Pawan Sehrawat, all of whom were called to the Bellary high-performance camp at the Inspire Institute of Sport from 27 March. There is room in the second-tier player pool — the 45-probables-per-group structure flagged by PKL commissioner Anupam Goswami — for new names to push into the conversation. A 58-raid-point Senior Nationals does that.
What the next 12 months look like for Rajput depends on which PKL franchise sees him first as a starting raider rather than a rotation piece. The Senior Nationals only happen once a year and rarely produce this clean a single-player narrative. Railways got the trophy. Maharashtra got the silver medal. Goa got the breakout. In Indian kabaddi, that last one tends to compound.
