Missing Sports Culture

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent admission that India does not even compete in half the events on the Olympic roster is an eye-opener for a nation of one and a half billion people. It is not a lack of talent that keeps India off the podium; it is the absence of anything that could honestly be called a sports culture. Countries with populations smaller than a single Indian district routinely field competitive teams across dozens of disciplines. India, by contrast, sent athletes to just sixteen of the thirty-two sports on offer at the Paris Olympics, leaving events such as surfing and sport climbing entirely uncontested - despite possessing one of the world's longest coastlines and no shortage of hill terrain.

This is not a new problem, nor is it one that can be blamed on modern distractions. It is tempting to point at smartphones and streaming services and conclude that today's children prefer screens to playgrounds. But this explanation does not survive scrutiny. Long before the internet reached Indian households, children were not routinely inclined to pick up a bat, a ball, or a pair of running shoes. The indifference to sport predates the technology that is now blamed for it. The truth is more uncomfortable: India has never built the habits, institutions or expectations that turn physical activity into a national pastime.

Compare the situation with countries where a child is encouraged to choose a sport before they even start school, where physical education is woven into the curriculum rather than treated as an afterthought squeezed in when time permits. In many such nations, a teenager competing at a world championship is unremarkable; gymnastics, in particular, is a discipline where champions are frequently made before they turn fifteen. In India, by contrast, a great many schools cannot guarantee clean toilets or functioning classrooms, let alone a playing field, a coach or basic equipment. When schools are stretched thin on fundamentals, sport is inevitably the first casualty.

What makes this especially frustrating is that many of the sports India ignores require little in the way of infrastructure. Running, cycling, and even climbing and surfing demand enthusiasm and access to open spaces far more than they demand stadiums or subsidised gymnasiums. Yet these disciplines remain almost entirely absent from the Indian sporting imagination. This points to something deeper than a funding gap - it points to a mindset gap. Sport is simply not regarded as a legitimate use of a child's time, still less as a viable career path, outside a narrow band of disciplines such as cricket.

Government schemes have not moved the needle as much as their branding suggests. Khelo India, for all its ambition, has yet to generate the grassroots enthusiasm needed to change how ordinary families think about sport. Hosting marquee events such as the Asian Games brings prestige and infrastructure to a handful of cities, but it does little to alter behaviour in the thousands of towns and villages where most Indian children grow up. Spectacle is not the same as culture. If India is genuinely committed to narrowing the gap with much smaller nations, the solution must start in the classroom rather than in the stadium. School curricula need to treat physical activity as compulsory and central, not optional and peripheral. Every child ought to be encouraged, from the earliest years, to adopt at least one sport as a matter of course - the same way they are expected to learn mathematics or a language. Fee waivers and incentives tied to sporting participation in government schools could be a low-cost, high-impact starting point, particularly for disciplines that need little more than open ground and willing instructors.

None of this requires reinventing the wheel. PM Modi is right to call India's Olympic record a bitter truth. But bitter truths only translate into change when they are followed by unglamorous, patient investment in school playgrounds, coaching and, above all, a cultural shift in how Indian families view sport - not as a distraction from education, but as part of it. Until that shift happens, India will continue producing brilliant individual champions in isolated pockets while remaining, as a nation, a spectator at its own Olympic Games.