Sports-forward India: The real Olympic goal
We must ensure a strong legacy plan that allows universalising access to sports and physical activity, with a specific focus on creating livelihoods in this space
The recently concluded Paris Olympics 2024 showcased our athletes, and we saw many excellent performances, though not all might reflect on the medal tally. Post Olympics, we need to work towards a long-term perspective leading to the realisation of the Prime Minister’s stated vision on Independence Day, of India hosting the 2036 Olympics as well as his commitment to making India a sporting nation.
Sport is a unique, universal quest that binds us as a nation and, in many ways, as a species. It enhances national pride, builds a sense of community, impacts key social indicators, and improves physical and mental health. India must now work on becoming a sports-forward and active nation, and netting the everyday benefits this can have for all of us.
Olympics 2036 is a chance for us to work in a systematic manner, where every child is given an opportunity at the school level to participate in sports. Our higher education institutes give opportunities for outstanding athletes to perform at their best level, similar in many ways to how collegiate athletics in the United States churn out excellence on a regular basis. For example, University of California, Los Angeles’s all-time Olympic medal count is 284, with 141 gold wins, while Stanford University athletes, on their own, won 39 medals at the Paris Olympics. While this, of course, includes students from across the world, mostly on scholarships, we should take bold steps in providing a pathway to our elite athletes to use colleges to hone their craft to be Olympics champions.
Given our natural advantages and favourable demographics, a focus on making Sports and Physical Activity (SAPA) a key performance area for India can be a game-changer. Each Olympics is an opportunity to acknowledge the role SAPA has in our lives and to make sure that future generations imbibe the values and enjoy the gains of active living while also building a deeper talent pool through mass participation, talent identification, and excellence across dimensions.
A sports-forward nation gives equal importance to sporting success and to participation in sports, seeing both as ways to promote and enable active living throughout our lifetimes. After all, having a sports culture in India is predicated on the chance for everyone to be a participant in sports. Greater participation, in turn, expands our talent pipeline. This makes sports excellence and active living symbiotic pursuits. This is the essence of a SAPA approach.
With its young population, India has the opportunity to be a lighthouse nation in SAPA for the rest of the world, excelling in sports and also in creating frameworks promoting an active India — at school, at work, in transit, in urban and rural settings — and using SAPA’s soft power, including through yoga and classical dance, to share a message of community, camaraderie, and social inclusion.
While our sports culture is accelerating, and our elite sports performance is improving, the equally meaningful outcomes SAPA has to offer India cannot be overlooked, along with the downstream benefits they foretell. An active population is a healthy and productive one, and a vibrant SAPA ecosystem can be a key growth sector and driver of future livelihoods and economic growth while also unlocking huge benefits for the economy from reduced health care costs and greater productivity of the working population. Without active measures to reduce sedentary living, we face an unprecedented health challenge.
SAPA can turn things around for India’s sports potential and also improve our overall health, especially non-communicable diseases (NCDs). A focus on SAPA can reduce our expenditure on NCDs, which currently contribute about 66% to India’s annual mortality burden, with this proportion expected to increase. SAPA can also help with improving mental health for the population, a well-established outcome of physical activity. Studies have also shown how regular SAPA promotes our growth and has multiple benefits for physical, mental, cognitive, and psychosocial health that undoubtedly contribute to our learning.
The ways in which SAPA can contribute to the economy are also clear-cut. India has a major demographic dividend for the next several decades and is expected to be the largest contributor to the global workforce, with over 950 million individuals. The SAPA ecosystem can catalyse growth. With the budget focusing on employment and skilling, an emerging sector like SAPA can drive the creation of jobs and livelihoods, as well as entrepreneurial and industrial opportunities. SAPA also has an indirect but sizeable impact on the workforce as a whole.
Across sectors, the benefit of a sporting and active India and an active workforce will be felt through the impact on productivity among the working population. The benefits of this increased productivity will largely be driven by reduced absenteeism among India’s workforce in high-growth sectors like IT, retail, manufacturing, and textiles. These will be critical value additions over the next several decades.
For India to lead the way in optimising SAPA and cementing our place in the global sports conversation, focused interventions, including prioritising sports at schools and colleges and creating skilling opportunities across the spectrum for jobs, will be important. Also necessary will be urban and institutional design and planning frameworks that allocate ample area in the form of fields and open green spaces with safety in access and participation, including free play, open gymnasiums, and yoga spaces. We are also uniquely positioned to optimise the use of technology to enhance inclusion and wider dissemination in sports participation, and this opens the doors for entrepreneurship opportunities.
Today, India is invested deeply in enabling a population that has immense potential to be a sports powerhouse, productive, active, and healthy. We must ensure we have a strong legacy plan that allows universalising access to SAPA with a specific focus on children playing sports and SAPA creating livelihoods. There is no better way of optimising the opportunity of an Olympics than by working towards having an active and healthy population. Without this, it will be difficult to have Olympic champions across dimensions and in large numbers. India has the opportunity to be a world leader in this movement, and creating a sporting and active India gives us all the chance to play and win together every day.
Amitabh Kant is G20 Sherpa, Government of India, and former CEO, NITI Aayog.The views expressed are personal