The key point is that, as in cricket, Indian badminton now has formidable bench strength. It is no longer dependent on a Suresh Goel here or a Prakash Padukone there, or a Syed Modi here or a Pullela Gopichand there. Indeed, Mr Gopichand, with the academy he set up after his retirement, has done more for Indian badminton than the BAI. That said, it is also true that BAI may have furthered Indian badminton's cause by launching the Indian Badminton League. But that has been more a defensive action than anything else. In the final analysis, it doesn't matter which game it is; the agencies that administer it are rotten because they are controlled by those from the world of politics and bureaucracy. Even in cricket, where India has now started winning regularly, the BCCI has been shown to be lacking in morality and ethics and even, perhaps, in competence.
This is a case of what economists call a principal-agent problem, in which the interests of the agent do not coincide with the best interests of the persons for whom he/she is supposed to act - the principal. The solution to this problem, it has been found, lies in devising the appropriate structure of incentives so that both sets of interest converge. This is what the sports ministry has to do. All that the ministry has to do is to appoint some competent professionals who have a decent understanding of this principle. They can then come up with a structure that can be tweaked to suit different sports. One must assume that the ministry - like the people of this country - are interested in sporting success. However, success does not come overnight; it takes years of training, world-class facilities and adequate funding to produce athletes capable of competing successfully on the global stage. In order to achieve this, various sporting bodies are constituted whose single purpose is to administer the sport they represent in order to win medals and trophies.
The problem lies in the fact that once these bodies are up and running there is no way of monitoring their efforts or motives; only outcomes are observable - and that too years later. In the meantime, there is little to stop the bodies and the people who run them from furthering their own interests. In many ways, this is no different from the difference between the interests of shareholders in a firm (long-term success) versus those of managers of the firm (short-term profits). The corporate sector has solved this problem by furthering transparency, accountability and regular performance reviews. The sports ministry and other stakeholders should show the same inclination and determination.