Long before she found her mark, Neeru Dhanda was drawn to guns.
When other girls her age wanted dolls, she says, she was drawn to toy tractors and toy guns. There was a wooden tractor, a bigger iron one and a toy gun that fired pellets. Those, she remembers, were the things she chose.
Years later, when a real gun finally found its way into her hands, the reaction was rather different.
The gun belonged to her cousin Lakshay Sheoran’s father, Somveer, and was an old Indian double-barrel shotgun of the sort families once kept for shooting pigeons in the fields. One day, they took Neeru to a farmhouse and decided to see if she could handle it. A tin sheet became the target. Two or three shots were fired.
The sound frightened her.
She was still young. The gun was heavy in her hands, the crack of the 7.5mm pellets unfamiliar and startling. She panicked and threw it away.
“I got scared,” she recalled in an interview with IndiaToday.in.
It is an unlikely beginning for the woman who, years later, stood in pouring rain at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, calmly breaking 28 of 30 targets to win a historic gold medal.
In Aichi-Nagoya, Neeru ended India’s 48-year wait for an individual trap gold. Earlier that day, she had won a women’s team silver with Aashima Ahlawat and Manisha Keer. The following day, she returned to the range and won another gold with Kynan Chenai in the mixed team event.
Three medals. Two golds. A silver. But the numbers only tell the end of the story.
For much of her journey, Neeru was not chasing Asian Games records. She was trying to find a way to build a better life for her family.
‘I HAD TO DO IT’
Neeru grew up in Sangatpura, a village in Haryana’s Jind district, in a family that could not afford the luxuries associated with a sport as expensive as shotgun shooting. Her father is a farmer. The family owns a modest amount of farmland, while her mother, Sudesh Devi, has supplemented their income by selling buffalo milk. The extent of those financial constraints was still evident on the morning Neeru won her Asian Games gold: her mother was on her way to collect the family’s ration when she heard the news.
Shooting was not an obvious career choice.
In fact, Neeru says she was not particularly good at studies. Nor did she grow up dreaming of becoming an elite athlete. Her first sporting association was with kabaddi.
Then came Lakshay. Her cousin had taken up trap shooting and won a silver medal at the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta. Neeru did not know much about shooting at the time.
“My cousin brother Lakshay came into the journey as well. He started shooting. I saw him and thought he was doing some modelling-type shooting. Then I saw his Asian Games medal in 2018. At that time, I was actually scared. I thought, how would I ever be able to shoot a bird? But when Lakshay won that medal, I became very inspired,” Neeru said.
The inspiration was not immediately glamorous. It was practical and improvised. Neeru began training with Lakshay’s gun and spent time with his family. She shot at tin cans. Somveer, a former national wrestler, helped her get accustomed to the recoil and the demands of the sport. Eventually, Lakshay’s family took her for trials at the Madhya Pradesh State Shooting Academy in Bhopal.
The academy changed the possibilities.
In 2019, Neeru moved to Bhopal. Access to guns, ammunition, coaching and a proper training environment meant that shooting was no longer something she could only experiment with using somebody else’s equipment.
But leaving home at 17 or 18 was a decision she did not take wholeheartedly.
“Leaving home at 17 or 18 is not easy,” she said. “You are not mature enough to make such big decisions. It was a risk, but I took that risk because I knew I had to do it, whatever happened.”
She remembers the first days at the academy vividly.
“When I joined the MP Academy, I cried a lot. I even threw my bag outside the academy. When I first joined, it felt like I had been sent to a jail. I was very young, and when my family left me there, I cried a lot,” she said.
Her family had brought her there, but once they left, she was on her own in a new environment, living away from home and learning to navigate a different family and a different life. Lakshay’s mother, Romila Kaur, became an important source of support.
The decision, though, was bigger than shooting.
“I had to do it,” Neeru said.
“My family’s condition wasn’t such that I could simply stop. If I didn’t do it, there was no one else who would.”
She does not describe that as pressure.
“I consider myself lucky. I was born into a family where I was able to develop myself and build a good life. If I had been born into another family, even one with more comforts, perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to develop myself in the same way.”
There is a certain toughness in the way she talks about those years. She does not romanticise them. She simply accepts that something had to be sacrificed.
When she was growing up, she did not spend much time wondering whether she was missing out. There were no casual trips out for burgers, pizzas or golgappas. If there were rotis at home, she ate them and left. Her life became training, travel and competition.
“If you want to achieve something, nature asks you to pay a price,” she said. “Whatever you want in the future, you have to give something up first.”
THE PRICE OF A SHOT
The economics of shooting made that sacrifice even more significant. Shotgun is expensive. Guns cost money. Ammunition costs money. Training and travel cost money.
Neeru’s early career depended heavily on support systems that she could access rather than on her family being able to finance everything themselves.
She remembers receiving Khelo India support of Rs 10,000 and 120 cartridges in the early stages of her career. TOPS support that Lakshay was receiving also helped her when she was starting out. She used cartridges that Lakshay got through the Sports Ministry’s scheme. Eventually, she herself became a TOPS athlete.
She talks about that support almost as a lesson in responsibility.
“I started through SAI and Khelo India. At the beginning, I used to get Rs 10,000 as pocket money and 120 cartridges. That’s where it started,” she said.
“Khelo India provides very good support for beginners. But if a player gets Rs 10,000, it shouldn’t be treated as money to spend on your personal wants, food, clothes or entertainment. You should put it into your training. Collect the money you need, buy your equipment and make yourself better. That’s what you should do with it.”
When she first realised that shooting could become a career, her goal was not to become an Asian Games champion.
“I started with a job as the goal,” she says.
The medals came later. Her first major confirmation arrived at the 2022 National Games in Gujarat. That was when she began to believe that she could genuinely become a good shooter.
By then, the journey had taken another turn. The Indian Army became part of it, too. Neeru spent years trying to secure her place, facing limited vacancies and other hurdles. She says there were even questions around her height, but people within the system fought for her selection.
Today, she serves as a Naib Subedar in the Corps of Military Police and trains at the Army Marksmanship Unit in Mhow. The child who once needed someone else’s gun now had a career, a coach, a team and a pathway. And then she started collecting results.
She won Asian Championship gold in 2025. In July 2026, she became the first Indian woman to win an individual ISSF World Cup gold in trap, in Lonato, Italy.
Still, the biggest test was waiting. 10 days before the individual final, Neeru had been discharged from hospital after an infection that kept her out of training for around three-and-a-half weeks. She arrived in Nagoya with her preparation severely disrupted, then stepped onto a rain-soaked range and shot 28 out of 30 to win gold. She would leave Japan with two golds and a silver.
THE FLAG-BEARER
Yet when Neeru talks about the Asian Games, it is not the gold that produces her biggest emotion. It is what came after.
She did not know she would be India’s flag-bearer at the closing ceremony until she landed back in India. The contingent reached late at night, the welcome followed, and she got home around 2 or 3am. By the next evening, she had to leave again for Japan.
“That was an even bigger feeling than the medal,” she said.
“Medals are won by many athletes. There have been champions before. Raja Randhir Singh was also a champion. But the journey I have had in my life, to carry the Indian flag, was a huge achievement for me.”
The significance of that moment goes back to a conversation with her mother around 2017-18, when Neeru was still trying to figure out where shooting could take her. She had asked her mother where she wanted to see her. The answer was bigger than a job or a secure career.
“She told me, ‘I want to see you carrying the Indian flag. I want to see you winning gold at the Olympics.'”
At the time, Neeru was still a teenager trying to find her feet in a sport in which every cartridge mattered. Now, she had lived one part of that dream. She wants the opportunity again, not only for herself but for the athletes she sees coming through behind her.
“I want God to give me this opportunity again and again,” she said.
“And the athletes who are coming up, who are working hard and struggling, I want them to also get that strength and experience that feeling.”
There is no sense of having arrived in her voice. If anything, the Asian Games have made the road ahead look longer.
She talks about Mansher Singh, the coach who has been beside her through much of the journey. He had never won an individual Asian Games gold in shotgun. Now, the athlete he had helped build had done it.
“He also had that goal,” Neeru said.
“When I won, it was special for him because his own athlete and favourite athlete had won.”
She laughs when she talks about Lakshay’s reaction. She showed him the medal over a video call while he was out at a mall. He was delighted.
“He said, ‘I have won now.’ I had a silver and he said, ‘You have gold. My gold is also here. I consider it my own.'”
At 26, she can look back at the teenager who left home with no guarantee that any of it would work out. What would she tell that 19-year-old today?
“I look back at that version of myself and say, ‘You made the right decision.’ At that time, the struggle felt like it was simply about getting a job so that I could give my family a good life. Now, all those struggles have been covered by these things.”
She speaks about the Olympic champions who came before her and wonders how much more they must have had to endure. Compared with them, she says, she has faced very little.
“I have many goals now,” she said.
“I want to win awards and I also want to become an Olympic champion.”
For now, though, she refuses to live too far ahead.
“The journey has only just started,” she says. “We are not thinking too far ahead. We are focusing on what we have to do today and how we have to prepare for the next competition.”
At 26, Neeru is already looking ahead. The Olympic gold her mother once imagined for her is now her own ambition.
Somewhere along the way, the little girl who chose toy guns over dolls, and threw the first real one away, grew into a woman who learned what to do when the real ones went off.
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