When the Indian colts lifted the Junior Hockey World Cup title last Sunday, the occasion marked more than the triumph of non-cricket sports in the country. Also implicit in this victory in a global tournament played in India — the final was held in Lucknow — is the impact of economic liberalisation on the sports business. The transformation has been little noticed partly because of the continuing overwhelming dominance of cricket in spectator interest, but consider the number of non-cricket sports properties that has evolved into significant events involving international stars and, importantly, global standards of sporting infrastructure. Much of this owes its origin to the growing prosperity in India and the ability to flaunt wealth in ways that were not possible before. This, in turn, has created a dynamic interplay between private ownership and public infrastructure.
The marquee Indian Premier League set the trend, of course, evolving into the richest cricket property in the world. In terms of its structure, the IPL was not novel, the idea having been unfairly appropriated by the Indian cricket board from the ever-innovative Subhash Chandra of the Zee group. Mr Chandra’s genius lay in recognising the huge potential for corporate investment in sport as a vanity business. Based on the enormously successful English Premier League annual football tournament, IPL’s chief virtue was in establishing an institutional framework within which private investors could be accommodated.
It also created an ecosystem within which aspiring young people could consider the sport as a full-time profession in itself, instead of relying on the age-old route of seeking nominal jobs with the railways or public sector banks and corporations to make ends meet. The way in which the IPL has expanded the market for cricketing talent not just across socio-economic classes but also to India’s second-tier cities is already in evidence.
The other spin-off from the IPL has been the exposure to international talent, an invaluable experience for young cricketers who in an earlier era rarely encountered Indian greats in the Ranji tournaments. After some false starts, the Hockey India League has built on this foundation with almost equal success by leveraging the same format and luring past and present international stars into one of the most watchable tournaments in the Indian sporting calendar. Two major spin-offs here have been the major improvement in hockey facilities — there is no longer a shortage of world-class Astroturf stadiums — and the transformation of small towns like Raipur and Ranchi from squalid coal boomtowns into metropolises with global hospitality services. Kabaddi, wrestling, football, badminton and tennis have all been beneficiaries of this trend to greater or lesser extent.
These developments play into the national sports milieu in positive ways. Winning the junior world cup in hockey is one concrete example and the hosting of the under-17 World Cup football tournament in 2017 is another. The Indian Super League, though nowhere near the standards of its European counterparts, has created an ecosystem of world-class stadiums and facilities that will make it easy to host this tournament with all due tamasha. In short, a sports culture is gradually establishing itself in India as a vibrant sub-sector of the entertainment industry. As the experience of China, which has followed the same trajectory though with less success, shows, there is a long way to go before the country can claim parity with western standards. But the start has been encouraging. If the cricket board’s predicament is anything to go by, the challenge going forward, perhaps will be keeping sports outside the purview of the government and the judiciary.
