Kolkata: The Professional Golf Tour of India (PGTI) will change its calendar to align it with the European Tour from this year. The last tournament in 2026 will be the DP World India Championship where, like last year, Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood are expected to take part. The PGTI qualifying school will start in October with the new season from November.
“This will ensure that the PGTI Order of Merit winner, who gets a card on the European Tour (which shares in DP World a common title sponsor with PGTI) does not miss out on tournaments,” said Amandeep Johl, PGTI’s 57-year-old CEO here on Friday.
In 2025, the last PGTI event, the Tata Open, ended on December 28. That meant its Order of Merit winner Yuvraj Sandhu missed European Tour events in November and December, said Johl, a former player and coach.
The 2025-26 European Tour began in Australia on November 21 and had five events before the end of the year. This year, the PGTI Q-school was in January and its first competition was the Chattisgarh Open from February 3.
PGTI’s wish to recalibrate its season – and prune the number of tournaments to avoid players’ fatigue – is why the full calendar for 2026 is not yet out, said Johl. Events till April 30 have been lined up as of now he said listing tournaments in Visakhapatnam, Hyderabad, Delhi and Srinagar.
For now, the focus will shift to the 72 The League, a six-franchisee event that starts in Delhi-NCR on Friday and will run for two weeks. Each team will have 10 players and competition will be held in the round robin format with two singles, two four-balls and one foursome.
“This has shown that golf can become a career option for players from 16 to 60,” said Johl, referring to teenager Kartik Singh and sexagenarian Mukesh Kumar who were bought at the players’ auction earlier in the week. The league will be taken to different cities, he said, adding that Mumbai and Pune together is an option for 2027.
Johl was at the Tollygunge Club for the final day of the DP World Players Championship which was won by Om Prakash Chouhan, 39, whose fourth day card of six-under 64 took him to a total of 16-under 264 and a cheque of ₹22.5 lakh. This was Chouhan’s first title in two years. Delhi’s Shaurya Bhattacharya and Manu Gandas, overnight leaders both, were tied second at 15-under 265 after going four-under on the final day.
The total prize purse here was ₹1.5 crore. As the number of tournaments are reduced, PGTI president Kapil Dev has spoken of the need to increase the purse so as to not affect the players’ income. To that end, the USA’s PGA Tour not renewing its association with PGTI after a three-year deal ended last July even though it had said it would has come as a hitch, said Johl. But he remained hopeful saying “we are talking through mediators.”
PGTI is also taking to get Asian Tour events back, said Johl who played for 20 years on that tour. “As we are with the South African and Thailand tours.” From a one-time high of four Asia Tour events, PGTI now has none.
The elephant in the room, rather the players’ lounge at the Tolly, was the Indian Golf Premier League. Run on the franchise model, it has lured away some players from the Tour, Gaganjeet Bhullar and SSP Chawrasia among them.
“For me, it is a competition for players seeking an assured income, which they were missing out on because they were missing cuts on the Tour, and not wanting to stay competitive. That said, there is an open invitation from the PGTI president to sit across the table and sort things out between us,” said Johl.
