Building for future, a new sporting culture

Hindustan Times

07-07-2025

Sports journalists aware of the reality of Indian sport usually have two responses to its policy documents — either a sigh or a snicker. But, given the National Sports Policy (NSP) 2025 aka Khelo Bharat Niti 2025 has arrived almost a quarter of a century after its last version — during which our elite sport has transformed itself — NSP 2025 must be understood in its context as well as essence: what it is and what it is not.
The NSP is not an action plan; rather, it is a framework of guiding principles, a mission statement meant to give direction to our sporting stakeholders to devise and execute programmes. It has evolved significantly from its 2001 avatar. Its fundamental breakaway is the broad-basing of the very identity of our sport. NSP 2001 treated sport as an entity built around elite excellence and, from there, medal-success in the world.
In NSP 2025, sport in India is to be accessed, treated and spread through multiple forms, of which elite excellence is only a small part. The policy integrates sport to public health and education. Through access, especially to the marginalised, it plays its part in community, business and scientific advancement. NSP 2025 directs sport in the service of a larger population than targeted earlier — the elite and the everyday, people of multiple abilities and identities.
From some perspectives, NSP 2025 is an inspiring way of looking at what Indian sport, if put to its best use, can do — beyond medals and that fickle entity called national pride or national self-esteem. (Frankly, in India, there are many other things to be embarrassed about other than medal tallies.)
But take the glass half-empty view and NSP 2025 reveals the pockmarks of Indian sport. Its 15 key objectives are a mirror to our inefficiencies and inequities. The mention of providing an 'athlete-centric support system' is quite telling of the support system. The objective to 'organise sports competitions at various levels, creating a robust competitive structure' highlights the lack of such currently.
The sport-is-a-state-subject excuse is used to bypass governance accountability. That the NSP's key focus area advocates, 'strengthening sporting culture and ecosystem from the block level to the national level' is proof that India's sporting pyramid at state level itself is built on shifting sand. The nexus between sports officialdom and heavy-handed political interference at every level remains a never-ending nightmare.
Among the key NSP objectives, no. 8 (strengthen governance and institutional frameworks in the sports sector) deserves a higher spot on the list, ahead of 'robust talent identification and development systems' and 'sports science and innovation'. But this complaint seems churlish because NSP 2025's strategic framework puts 'strong professional sports governance, implementation and monitoring' right at the top. States have been asked to modify their existing sports policies 'if any', or use NSP 2025 as the benchmark for their future plans. Better known than the NSP, but still in a somewhat amorphous state, is the National Sports Governance Bill 2024. In its draft phase, the bill sought to overhaul sports governance structures and set up an independent regulatory body and tribunal. Naturally, its promised public appearances keep getting delayed. Whether it will be sighted in the next Parliament session is unclear.
At the same time as the NSP was released, a key gathering between an Indian delegation and the International Olympic Committe (IOC), around India's bid to host a future Olympics, took place. The 16-member Indian delegation was made up of Indian Olympic Association (IOA) president PT Usha, its chief executive officer Raghuram Iyer, Gujarat sports minister Harsh Sanghvi, sports secretary, government of India, two Gujarat government principal secretaries (one of whom was also the Ahmedabad municipal commissioner), consultants from EY India and Burson Sports, one consular staff from the Indian embassy in Switzerland, a president from the chairman's office, Reliance India Limited, and a businessman some in the delegation didn't know much about. This group of 14 men, two women and zero contemporary Indian sportspeople met the IOC's Future Host Commission. Here, for the first time, the IOC and the Indian public was officially informed of the name of our prime Olympic host city candidate: Amdavad/Ahmedabad.
It is an unusual choice, and not just because there was no public discussion around the choice of the best Indian city/region to host an Olympics, nevermind the question of whether India needs to stage a Games. There has been no tradition of Ahmedabad either staging international or even major national sporting events, other than say in the last five years. Nor does the state of Gujarat, unlike Haryana or Manipur, send a sizeable number of athletes to any level of global mega events, continental championships or other multinational events. In the last two National Games, Gujarat finished 17th and 16th in the medals tally. In order to beef up its global host portfolio, Ahmedabad will stage the 2029 World Police and Fire Games.
This seems counter to the NSP 2025, which offers non-sporty states a framework to create pathways to build sporting ecosystems from the block level upwards, rather than aim for top-down osmosis.
India's Olympic ambitions, whatever the host city, must contain the humility to accept that our records in governance and doping are particularly abysmal. Until very recently, the IOA's executive board was at war with its president over the appointment of its CEO. The IOC is well aware of this, as it will be of the recent World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) study that pegged India's positivity rate highest among nations that analysed more than 5,000 samples. Let's look at NSP 2025 as more than a response to our sporting truths and greed for stadium construction/event management. It offers India a forward-looking, inclusive vision that uses sport to reach more people and reap benefits that can be replicated across generations.
Sharda Ugra writes on sports. The views expressed are personal.