It may be early days yet, but there are many indications that the Indian sports scene is finally, and thankfully, diversifying away from cricket. Of course, going back a few years, India has had a strong global presence in shooting, with Abhinav Bindra and his gold medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympics being the most prominent representative of this sport, not to mention Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, an Olympic silver medallist and the current minister of state for information and broadcasting. Mary Kom's performances in the boxing ring inspired a Bollywood biopic. However, while not taking anything away from these outstanding athletes, shooting and boxing are niche sports, not likely to invite widespread following and participation.
More recently, though, the Indian hockey team's qualifying for the Rio Di Janeiro Olympics in 2016 by virtue of its Asian Games gold medal and, in the past few weeks, the ascent of Saina Nehwal and Sania Mirza to world number one positions in badminton singles and tennis doubles, respectively, reflect rising standards in sports that are being and can be played by much larger numbers of people. Badminton, in particular, is an extremely popular sport, being played across the country in community and club facilities. Saina Nehwal is far from being the only role model for enthusiastic shuttlers. Apart from her, P V Sindhu is highly ranked in the women's game, while Parupalli Kashyap and, more recently, Kidambi Srikanth are perched high up in the men's rankings. And, Anirban Lahiri made the cut in the first golf grand slam tournament of the year, the Augusta Masters, finishing with a creditable 49th rank.
The rise of Indian athletes in global rankings across a variety of sports is a critical requirement for developing sustainable mass interest in these sports. This needs to be complemented by some other initiatives. Developing television-friendly competitive formats is certainly one of them. Notwithstanding early hurdles in evoking interest, it is heartening to see the emergence of Indian Premier League (IPL) formats in hockey, football, badminton and kabaddi. Even if some or all of these fail to achieve financial viability, there are signs that spectator interest and willingness to watch are there, waiting to be tapped by the right format. An important element in developing commercially successful leagues is fan loyalty and identification with teams. One driver of this is relatively long seasons, which, in the early years, put teams at the risk of entering into a loss-making spiral. But, then, this is hardly rocket science; there are any number of successful professional circuits around the world and it should not be too difficult for enterprising promoters to develop a sustainable model beyond cricket. Experimentation and fine-tuning should lead to successful league formats in more than one sport.
Another essential requirement is the availability of and access to reasonable facilities and coaching, which then facilitates a continuing process of local, regional and national competitions. It is only through this filtration that genuine talent rises to the top. Professional leagues need to be fed by efficient school and college level platforms for competition. While private initiatives can contribute to this process, the primary responsibility is with the state because it is based on universal access. One way of combining resource flows from both sectors is to make sports facilities and coaching programmes eligible for funding under corporate social responsibility initiatives. In short, even as the country celebrates the success of Saina Nehwal, Sania Mirza and their cohort, it will be important to remember that the diversification of India's sports enthusiasm may be pushed by star athletes but will be sustained by a productive collaboration between private and public initiatives.
