Six medals. That is all that India â€" the world's second most populous country â€" managed to win at the London Olympics. While six is a record, it is still a pitiful showing for a country with ambitions to become a great power.
Mexico, Georgia and Ethiopia won more medals at the London Olympics than India. The nation has only ever won 26 medals in its entire history â€" only four more than the swimmer Michael Phelps has won by himself. In field hockey, a national sport, India fared miserably. In badminton, a sport invented in Pune, India won only one medal â€" and that came in part because of a default by a Chinese woman.
What gives?
There are likely mul tiple reasons for India's relatively poor showing. One is clearly cultural. School-age children are encouraged to study hard, and parents often see sports as an unwanted intrusion on academics. But there is also the issue of money, and how world-class athletes can pay for all the training expenses and time they must devote to their sports.
India's sports ministry recently promised that all 81 Olympians in India's contingent this year would receive permanent government jobs. It is understood that these will be midlevel coaching jobs with a salary of 40,000 rupees ($715) a month at India's premier sporting institution, the Sports Authority of India. The athletes can continue with their sporting careers and then get a diploma in coaching before they start working as coaches.
The cabinet has also approved giving three promotions, in addition to the usual seniority-based promotions, to medal winners in any international sporting event who already have central governme nt jobs.
Clearly, India is looking beyond the London Olympics, but its focus may be on the wrong things. Instead of thinking of ways to groom future champions, it is concerned with rewarding established athletes.
And the reward itself may even be counterproductive to the government's goal of cultivating champions. “A lot of athletes in India give up their sporting careers the moment they get jobs,†said Kamalesh Chatterjee, the honorary general secretary of the Bengal Olympic Association, the West Bengal chapter of the Indian Olympic Association.
A retired civil servant, Mr. Chatterjee has been in sports administration for 35 years. He said he wants the sports ministry to install a few safeguards to ensure the new decision to give government jobs works for the improvement of sports in the country.
“There has to be a system to monitor the athletes who take up these jobs,†he said. “If they continue as active sportspersons, then they must keep performing at the same level they were. And if they straightaway take up coaching assignments, they have to be held accountable for how their wards perform over the next five years.â€
Even with such safeguards, should the central government be providing more incentives to do well at the Olympics? It has already spent a lot of taxpayer money in preparing India's top athletes for the London Games. In comparison, the Olympic efforts of the United States, which topped the medal tally in London, and Great Britain, which came third, are not backed by the government, relying instead on private donations from corporates, individuals and communities. India, for all its armchair fans and experts, cannot bank on similar involvement from its people when it comes to preparing athletes for Olympics.
According to the Web site of the Indian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, the central government spent upwards of 1.35 billion rupees to train experienced athletes in 16 disc iplines at home and abroad under its program, Operation Excellence-London 2012, shortened to Opex-London 2012.
The program started with 705 elite athletes who were seen as likely to qualify for the 2012 Olympics in archery, athletics, badminton, boxing, gymnastics, hockey, judo, rowing, sailing, shooting, swimming, table tennis, taekwondo, tennis, weightlifting and wrestling. Some athletes were dropped from the program and new ones added before the final pool was whittled down to 585. Of them, 81 represented India in the 2012 Games.
While this is indeed India's largest contingent at any Olympics, Opex-London 2012 failed in certain disciplines. More than 70 million rupees was spent on 40 gymnasts, and not one of them qualified for the Games. Taekwondo (more than 26 million rupees) and sailing (more than 30 million rupees) also did not yield a single Olympian.
The program had another shortcoming in that it covered a period of only 220 to 250 days and was conc eptualized only after India's good performances at the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games and at the Asian Games held in Guangzhou, China, the same year. “It ran for just a year,†Mr. Chatterjee said.
However, the central government has had other programs for elite athletes for more than a decade. Since 2001-02, it has provided financial assistance to many athletes from its National Sports Development Fund, and one name that has featured frequently on the list of beneficiaries is the 10-meter air-rifle shooter Abhinav Bindra, the only Indian to have won an Olympic gold in an individual event, which he did in 2008.
The fund spent 70 million rupees in 2009-10 and 64 million rupees in 2010-11. In 2011-12, the money from the fund was routed through Opex-London 2012.
“Elite athletes in India do get a lot of funds nowadays, but money is not enough,†said Abhijit Kunte, a chess grandmaster who is a founder-member of the Pune nonprofit organization, Lakshya, whi ch aims to plug gaps in government planning for athletes. “You also need to get them the right people, such as mentors, physiotherapists and mental coaches.â€
The real problem lies in the feeder lines. One big obstacle is the lack of funds for cultivating young athletes with talent. “I have seen in the U.S. and other European countries, the schools and colleges and other educational institutions groom athletes. That is the model we must follow,†said Mr. Kunte.
Yet in the two most recent budgets available on the sports ministry's Web site, for 2009-10 and 2010-11, the central government did not spend a rupee on promotion of sports in schools, colleges and universities.
Mr. Kunte is also not happy with lack of financial support from the state governments, which have the primary responsibility of overseeing sports, rather than the central government. “They must support players at the local levels. A lot of people need to play competitive sports for I ndia to be able to unearth top athletes,†he said.
In India, there are organizations looking after sports at different levels. Apart from the Youth Affairs and Sports Ministry and state governments, there is the Indian Olympic Association, with chapters in different states. In addition, each sport has a national federation and associations in every state. Sometimes two or three such associations in a state are competing for an affiliation with the national federation.
As might be expected, there is a lack of coordination among the different organizations, but more importantly, most of their funds come from a single source: the central government.
“Apart from cricket, no other sport in India is strong enough to survive without government support,†said Viren Rasquinha, a former Olympic field hockey player who is part of Olympic Gold Quest, a not-for-profit organization that supports some of India's top athletes. “But private partnership has to be enc ouraged. The national federations need to become more professional and work towards attracting commercial interest.â€
The Olympic Gold Quest has a number of corporate partners, but Mr. Rasquinha said that raising funds for Olympic sports in India is the “toughest thing†because these sports don't have a mass following. “We currently support 33 athletes, but by the next Olympics in 2016, we want to expand and have around 100 athletes with us. For that, we have to work really hard.â€
Corporate sponsorship will also bring in accountability, said Mr. Rasquinha. “The three things that corporates want to see are credibility, accountability and impact,†he said.
India can only hope that the impact is visible sooner rather than later.
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