Coal India joins the sports sponsorship league

By backing hockey tournament for first time, it closed a key gap in its sports promotion policy

When public sector undertaking Coal India signed up as the title sponsor of the Hockey India League a year ago, eyebrows were raised regarding the rationale behind the move. Coal India is the country’s largest coal miner, supplying the resource to power producers, metal manufacturers and cement makers among other users. As a B2B undertaking, therefore, skeptics argued there was no consumer connect for Coal India to establish. And hence the sponsorship of a high-profile event, they said, was out of place given that Coal India had coughed up Rs13 crore for the title sponsorship of the tournament in the