The Olympic Games 2024 are done and dusted. India have finished 71st and didn't win a single gold medal; we won 1 silver and 5 bronze (*Vinesh Phogat's plea for a silver medal awaits a verdict from the Court of Arbitration for Sport).
For a country of 1.4 billion, it has been another Olympic event where we failed to cross the 10-medal mark. There are many areas of improvement for our country, and things can only get better for India in the Olympics, if focus on all sports starts from the grassroots level.
The first place of learning for a child is the school. It is the school, where a child learns the basics of education. But when we educate a child in a school, is it only academics we should be teaching or sports also should be given equal emphasis? Does that culture exist in every school of India, where sports and academics go hand-in-hand?
From school, a student moves to a college and then on to a university. Most students, aiming to pursue higher studies, join a well-known college or university; sports either exist as a recreational activity or are non-existent in many cases, as academic courses take up most of the time. Sports must be an integral part of every curriculum in India. There should be marks/grades for sports as there are for any academic subject. A certain physical fitness score/grade has to be mandatory, along with marks scored by students in academics. This will create the habit of playing sports amongst all students, something that has disappeared nowadays, mostly due to ill-advised lifestyle changes.
The importance of a school with sports facilities is a must. No school must be allowed to function without a playground. A physical training (P.T.) teacher must be there in every school and must ideally be a former state level or national level sportsperson. But PT teachers are either mostly non-existent in schools, or are not given the status of a Math/English/Science teacher, who are considered “privileged faculties”. I have rarely seen or heard PT teachers having a big say in school administration. In most cases, PT classes get a very small period (maybe once or twice a week, on an average for 30-60 mins.) and sometimes, PT classes get replaced by other subjects in an urge to complete curricula through extra classes.
Sometimes a PT teacher's job is limited to examining uniforms or handling errant students only. And that's how a stereotype about sports and its importance is established amongst students (& parents too!), from a young & impressionable age. We see schools proudly showing students securing great marks in competitive exams, through ads in newspapers & social media. How many times have schools shown their students winning state or national championships? Some schools do that, but don’t see the culture of highlighting good sports results by every school, because every school in India doesn’t strive for success in sports as they do for academics.
Only when we make grassroots level changes, things will happen. A sporting culture has to be created first before we become a sporting nation and dream of Olympic success. Amongst higher level educational infrastructure, many universities in the USA, UK, Australia, etc., have world class sporting facilities like Olympic size swimming pool, basketball courts, volleyball courts, football ground, athletic track, etc.Students there are exposed to world class infrastructure, thereby creating a strong urge to use those facilities and be a performer in sports.
If I compare that to India and more particularly to what is there in Assam, there are great institutions like Gauhati University, Cotton University, Tezpur University, Dibrugarh University, Assam Agricultural University,etc., in our state. They have fantastic academic programmes for students. But they have hardly promoted sports by having international class sports facilities.
Randomly ranking the level of sports infrastructure amongst universities of Assam, Tezpur University will stand out but don't think they can claim to be one of the best in the country. But there are some success stories notably from northern India, a traditional breeding ground for champion athletes in our country. During a visit to Punjab, I personally saw the Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana having some great sports infrastructure and lots of students are into sports there besides academics.
A success story from the private sector of the education ecosystem of our country is the Lovely Professional University (LPU) of Jalandhar. According to a recent media report, twenty four students (former & present) from LPU represented India at the Paris Olympics 2024, including notable names like javelin legend Neeraj Chopra, hockey bronze medalist and India’s captain Harmanpreet Singh. That's why places like Punjab and Haryana produce top class sportspersons as they have sports well integrated with academic infrastructure. Why cannot all states replicate that ? Why cannot all universities of India have sports infrastructure like universities abroad? One of the most significant challenges is the lack of maintenance of the existing sports infrastructure present in schools, colleges and universities. Many sports facilities are poorly maintained, which makes them unsafe for students. This can discourage people from using these facilities and can impact the development of sports in the country. Some facilities are lying underutilised due to lack of instructors. To quote the renowned novelist Paulo Coelho, “it’s what we do in the present, that will redeem the past, and thereby change the future.”
Adding further on the subject of universities and students, 13 athletes, who are from the famous Harvard University of USA, this time won Olympic medals in Paris 2024. We have to integrate academics and sports in our country. It is not a new phenomenon, but a significant one for India to observe and act ; in creating great sports culture, educational institutions can play a pertinent role. The fixated mindset of educational infrastructure producing only doctors, engineers, scientists, etc., is one of the many reasons that has plagued India's sports culture. We have to pick up these tattered pieces of our sports culture, and rejoin them into a stronger structure that will help us produce champion athletes.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look changes”.
There is where the mindset change will begin and probably we will not say , “no use playing, study and stand on your own feet.
Postscript: The USA's National Collegiate Athletic Association i.e. the NCAA, has been organising the intercollegiate athletics event since 1906.NCAA programmes for decades served as America's Olympic training ground for many sports. The NCAA is a nonprofit organisation that regulates student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, and one in Canada. It also organises the athletic programmes of colleges and helps over 500,000 college student athletes who compete annually in college sports. Famous Olympians like Michael Phelps, Venus Williams, among others are products of NCAA programme.
(All thoughts and views expressed are the author's own.)