One of fourteen Olympic hockey players produced by the village of Sansarpur (population 4,000), Jagjit Singh was educated at Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jalandhar and at Panjab University where he was a member of the hockey team that won the Inter-University hockey championship in 1960. After graduating he joined the Punjab Police where his performances in midfield brought him first to the attention of the selectors of the Punjab state team and then, in 1964, a call-up to the national team for their tour to New Zealand and Malaysia.
Singh was only a fringe player at the 1964 Olympics and played in just two of India’s nine games as they won the gold medal but figured more prominently when they won the Asian Games in 1966. He toured extensively with the Indian team through the mid sixties playing in Europe (1965), Japan (1966), Sri Lanka and Afghanistan (1967), East Africa and Egypt (1968) and France (1968) and helped the team win the tournaments in Hamburg in 1965 and Madrid in 1967. He also participated in the pre-Olympic tournament in London in 1968.
A first-choice for India at the start of the 1968 Games he lost his place after the opening game loss to New Zealand and that signaled the end of his career with the national team. At domestic level he played for Punjab Police until 1967 when he was promoted to deputy superintendent with the Border Security Forces. In tandem with his career with the Police and BSF teams he played eight years with the Punjab state team and was captain in 1968. A winner of the Arjuna Award, India’s premier sporting honour, in 1967 he had suffered ill health for many years before his death in 2010.
India