Yesterday, as usual I was sitting cozily in my couch was skipping through the TV channels, to get some news. Instead what I found in all the news channels was IPL auction. It was mouthwatering to see the amount of bucks cricketers were being bought for. As I watched Mallyazz,Prietyz,SRKzzz pull out their big money kitty to buy players, it was clear that cricket was as much a business in this country where one can earn money as it was a sport. We had fringe players in Indian cricket like yusuf pathan, parthiv patel being bought for crores. I started wondering why the media doesn't give such attention to other sports. It’s always about cricket in this country. Few weeks ago, I saw a news that the badminton training session for the national players prior to a international tournaments were canceled due to the shortage of corks. The reason given was even more pathetic, Sports authority of India (SAI) did not have any funds to buy corks. Its an irony that a country like Ethiopia which is at the bottom of the worlds poorest nations is able to win gold medals at the Olympics, but India which boasts being fastest growing economy with(9% GDP per year next to Chinese of course) is struggling to win a medal at the Olympics every time(believe me the last time India won a gold at the Olympics was in 1980,Moscow games for hockey and hockey is no were in the radar of top Indian sports today) .The problem is that all the funds are being tunneled into one game and the rest of games have to fight for the scraps left behind.
This lack of funds and opportunities is one of the main reasons that India doesn't shine in other sports. You need not be a Einstein to figure out that youngsters take up careers where there is lucrative money to be made. The amount of money IPL as generated including TV rights, sponsorship and auction bids is around 1 billion dollars and the amount allocated to overall Indian sports(hockey ,football ,athletics ,shooting, everything etc) by the government in the last budget is ridiculously low 167 crore or 415,939.38 USD .Its very funny to know that a single cricket player Mahender Singh Dhoni is earning far more money than the amount allocated to all the Indian sports put together in the budget, for playing a sought of first time domestic league such as IPL.I m not saying this country is in short of talent, its just that we make poor usage of our resources and no sport is viable enough for youngsters as a career option (except for cricket).Even if somebody wants to take up some other sports ,he/she might have talent but the resources and the money needed to train and compete at the top level will elude the person.
Despite this sorry state of affairs in Indian sports all hope is not last. If there is any country that India should lookup to emulate, it’s China. China was no better than India in world sports , no where to be found in medals tally in 1980's.But in the last Athens games the Chinese finished second in the overall tally second only to US. Within period of 25 years Chinese have gone from being zero in sports to heroes. How did Chinese bring about this change in such a short time? The answer is proper allocation of resources, backed up by world class training. We talk of the IITs and IIMs being the premier world class institutions in india. The Chinese have setup world class Elite Sports institutions (sports equivalent of IITs and IIMs) for training their sports people in almost every province. Most important of all is amount of money allocated to this institutes alone (not the whole sports programme) is 83,97,250.26 USD (nearly 16 times the Indian sports budget). A student of IIT and IIM is assured of his future with placements and job, a student getting into these elite sports schools is assured of his/her life's income by the government, the only condition being he/she must win medals at international events. Only arrangement like the above will enable India to reach a global stature in sports. It’s also media’s responsibility to throw some well needed attention on other sports success stories so that youngsters can look up to them. Let’s hope within the next 25 years from now that we will able to see India being at the top of the medal's tally at international sports events.
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