Behind India’s best-ever performance with seven medals at the Olympics this year, including the first ever gold in athletics, lies a heart-warming story of change in the country’s sport ecosystem in which India Inc has played a major role. India Inc-government coordination has acquired a degree of professionalism in recent years. Nothing symbolises the new seriousness in India’s approach to Olympics in particular and sport in general this year than the conspicuous absence of a large official contingent led by the Sports Minister — which was the norm in the past. In the 2016 Rio Olympics, the then Sports Minister, leading an oversized entourage, was censured by the organisers for “unacceptable behaviour”. This time Kiren Rijiju, who till recently was Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports, did not go to the Tokyo Olympics. He rightly decided that what the Indian contingent needed was not an official delegation but additional support staff such as coaches, doctors and physiotherapists.

States such as Odisha, Punjab, Haryana and Delhi have devoted resources to boosting sport infrastructure, besides tying up with corporate-sponsored initiatives such as JSW Sports headed by Parth Jindal, Olympic Gold Quest founded by sporting legends Geeth Sethi and Prakash Padukone, GoSports Foundation which is promoted by Rahul Dravid and P Gopichand. The Odisha Government, which has sponsored the men’s and women’s hockey teams since 2018, has played a key role in India’s hockey revival. The fact that nine out of the 16-member Indian women’s hockey squad, including the skipper Rani Rampal, hail from Haryana, tells us what a push to sport can achieve. Their performance is also a story of grit against adversity — social and economic — in an acutely patriarchal milieu.

Rijiju aligned the activities of the Centre’s flagship sporting policy ‘Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS)’ under the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports with different professional corporate bodies to hone the crème de la crème of about 200 sportsmen for the world’s premier sporting event in Tokyo. TOPS and ‘Khelo India’, another programme launched by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports to revive sports culture in India, have worked in coordination with corporate-funded initiatives. But while the top talent is now getting the attention it requires, India is still not doing enough to augment sport infrastructure to spur fresh talent. A Budgetary allocation of ₹2,596 crore towards sport for FY 2021-22, 8 per cent below the previous year, is a pittance in relation to the kind of infrastructure that India requires to spread its net wide for the next Olympics. India’s sports bodies are riddled with politics, corruption and nepotism and need a clean-up. The 56 National Sports Federations, eligible to receive financial and other assistance from the government, continue to be run by politicians. India has miles to go, but a humble beginning has been made.

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