Ahead of the celebration of this year's International Yoga day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday called on the Indian sports persons and athletes to make yoga a regular part of their routine and training.
"Our athletes should also consider making yoga a regular part of their routine and training. The outstanding results will be for the whole world to see. It is an added responsibility to make yoga even more popular across the world," said Prime Minister Modi while inaugurating the synthetic track and stadium of the Usha School of Athletics located in Kozikode in Kerala through video conferencing.
"And like yoga has become popular, we must make our traditional sports popular globally," he added.
The International Yoga Day would this year commemorate its third anniversary ever since its inception on June 21, 2015.
Speaking on the occasion, Prime Minister said during earlier decades, there was an environment in which sports was not pursued as a career, but now this thinking has began to change.
"A strong sporting culture can help the growth of a sporting economy," he said.
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"Sports is closely linked to human resource development of a society. I have always been off the view that in addition to keep the body healthy, sports always transforms the personality, bringing about holistic development, instills discipline ethos of hard work. It provides learning for life which enriches our thought process."
"For me, sports includes these attributes; S-Skill, P-Perseverance, O-Optimism, R-Resilience, T-Tenacity, S-Stamina," he added.
Prime Minister Modi also stated that there is no dearth of talent in India but there is a need to provide right kind of opportunity and create an ecosystem to nurture that talent.