Indian sport is on the cusp. If recent trends are anything to go by, Indian stars are now winning medals in almost every international competition, across sports, or at least coming close. The Sudirman cup reverse notwithstanding, India has done well in badminton. The table-tennis players’ efforts at the ongoing world championship haven’t been bad either. Boxing, both the men’s and women’s teams, is looking up again, and shooting too is on an upswing. Athletics has been the shining light with many national records rewritten in the last month or so, not to mention Neeraj Chopra making it to the very top of the javelin world rankings. And the fundamental reason why this is now reality is because there is a lot more money in sport. With direct intervention from the Prime Minister, sport is now a priority for the government, and the results are starting to show.
On the positive side of the ledger, the funding for sports in India has increased. In early 2016, India was spending about Rs 11.5 per Indian on sports (with about Rs 1,541 crore in the union sports budget). By 2019, this spending had increased to Rs 16.5 per Indian (with an overall sports budget of Rs 2,216.92 crore). And the last union budget further added to the quota allocated for sport.
What does this mean in real terms? The National Sports Development Fund (NSDF) was set up by the government in 1998–99 with just Rs 2 crores in its corpus. In the two decades since, it has raised over Rs 240 crores (with roughly 38 per cent coming in from private sources, 35 per cent from government-owned companies and the rest from the government itself).
Overall, as the sports ministry reported to Parliament, funding for the training and participation of elite athletes in international events through support given to sporting federations went up almost fourfold between 2014–15 (Rs 130 crore) and 2019–20 (Rs 482.5 crore budget ceiling).
For Tokyo 2020 in particular, the SAI announced in December 2018 that Rs 100 crore had been earmarked for the government’s Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS), which identifies elite athletes and supports their training. The TOPS itself was set up in September 2014 and became operational by mid-2015. Abhinav Bindra headed its selection committee through all of 2017, when 220 athletes were funded by the scheme. In 2016, the TOPS spent Rs 19.9 crore on athletes in seventeen sports. This spending increased to Rs 28.17 crore across nineteen sports in 2017–18. By September 2019, eighty-nine sportspeople, including several para-athletes, were being funded in twelve sports.
What do these numbers mean at the ground level? Let’s take the example of Pullela Gopichand, the badminton national coach, and his academy in Hyderabad. ‘The total players at the academy are not much actually,” said Gopi. “It’s about 180-odd. But overall, the number of players who are playing badminton in the country has grown exponentially. The government has been supportive. For the SAI Gopichand National Academy, they gave about Rs 5 crores in funding from the NSDF, which was very good.
“Also for the Gopichand Academy, we have players supported by the government in terms of food and accommodation. So overall, food, accommodation plus tournament exposure for these kids is a huge support from the government of India. In the last few years, whether it is elite players or the Academy, I definitely would say that the top players should be very thankful for the tremendous support we have got from government.”
Second, there is a lesson to draw from cricket, which grew as a business because of the money that television brought into the game. Cricket reigns supreme in India, but in the last few years, the country’s market for sports has also grown significantly. The industry’s size expanded from $1.7 billion in 2013 to about $2.7 billion in 2018, and is now approximately $6-7 billion in 2023. This is important because sporting infrastructure requires money. In 2018, the managing director of Star India at the time, Sanjay Gupta, told the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) Scorecard forum that the sports industry’s size could expand to about $10 billion by 2024. “Over the last few years, the kind of activity around the business of sports has been tremendous,” he pointed out. “There are now over fifteen domestic leagues in the country – across kabaddi, football, kho kho, badminton – from just two, five years back.”
When television starts focusing on sports and creating stars, it has a knock-on effect in terms of aspiration. In the case of badminton, as Gopichand points out, the catchment area has increased. “I think what used to be about thirty or forty players in numbers has actually gone up to around 2,000–2,500,” he said. “So, the number of people playing the game seriously has increased by maybe 100–200 per cent every year in the last few years, especially in the thirteen-to-fifteen-year sub-junior categories. These are amazing numbers, and the quality of players who are playing at a certain level has gone up as well. Earlier, ten years ago, there were maybe ten kids who could actually play a serious rally. That number has gone to many thousands now. So, I think, the overall standard of grassroots-level badminton has grown drastically.”
And all this has been possible because of the money that has come into sport. Even rewards have grown exponentially for medal winners, and sports stars now earn considerable wealth in the course of a successful career. Take the case of Chopra. He is now one of India’s highest-paid stars who charges only less than Virat Kohli when it comes to endorsement fees. Chopra received nearly 15 crores in the form of rewards after winning a gold medal in Tokyo and is now one of India’s most sought-after celebrities. The same applies to PV Sindhu. Her two Olympic medals have made her one of India’s best-known global stars and these athletes now come close to film personalities in terms of earnings.
What is also a welcome sign is how some states have taken to sports, and are now investing considerable wealth in creating world-class infrastructure. The one state that has taken the lead in this regard is Odisha. Having undertaken multiple visits to the state and seen the infrastructure, I can say with certainty that Odisha will soon be the sporting capital of India in terms of infrastructure. With many hockey pitches spread across Sundargarh, Rourkela and Bhubaneshwar, football, shooting, badminton and India’s first athletics indoor stadium, the direct involvement of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has gone a long way to making the state stand out in the sporting domain.
Vineel Krishna, Secretary Sports, and the man who leads this revolution, says there is still much to do. “The Hockey World Cup was a signature event,” says Krishna. “We had put in a lot of effort into staging the U-17 women’s FIFA World Cup and the results are for all to see.”
Multiple public-private partnerships and the involvement of stars like Abhinav and Gopichand has added heft to the Odisha model. And behind all this is investment. The wealth invested by the government has made a fundamental difference, and one can hope other states will soon follow this template and help in making India a true multi-sporting country.
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