India asks why it won so few Olympic medals

NEW DELHI // As the Olympic Games wound to a close in London, the inevitable question started to be asked in India: Why does a country with 1.2 billion people come away with so few medals, especially compared to smaller and poorer nations? India has so far won two silver medals from pistol shooter Vijay Kumar and Sushil Kumar in freestyle wrestling as well four bronze medals by badminton star Saina Nehwal, rifle marksman Gagan Narang, boxer Mary Kom and wrestler Yogeshwar Dutt. In comparison, North Korea won six medals - including four golds - while Azerbaijan won nine medals, Colombia eight, and Belarus 12. India's tally is its best-ever in any Olympics Games, which only further highlights its poor Olympic record. It is, as the former sports minister Mani Shankar Aiyar told The National on Friday, "a dreadful performance [when] compared to our population". Mr Aiyar, who served as minister from 2006 until 2009, called for a national sports policy with "more spine" and said that "95 per cent of our young population … has never had access to sports." India's obsession with cricket has often been blamed for its neglect of other sports, which remain under-funded and unable to excite young Indians. Sporting infrastructure at the grassroots level in India is still woefully inadequate, said V Srinivasan, treasurer of the P T Usha School of Athletics in Kozhikode, in Kerala. The school is named after his wife, one of India's most distinguished sprinters, who now coaches women runners. One of Ms Usha's 17 athletes, Tintu Luka, placed sixth in the second heat of the 800m semi-finals at the London Olympics. The school has two eight-lane mud tracks, said Mr Srinivasan. To train on a synthetic track, athletes travel four hours to the town of Mysore, in the neighbouring state of Karnataka. "We may be one of the premier academies for sports for track training for girls, but infrastructure-wise, we are zero," he said. Ms Usha's school was set up with private donations from individuals. It spends 3 million rupees (Dh199,000) a year to meet its students' nutrition and equipment needs, Mr Srinivasan said. Public expenditure on sports has grown in the recent past, but it is still found wanting, he said. In 2010-11, the Indian sports ministry had a budget of 35.6 billion rupees but that year was an exception because India was hosting the Commonwealth Games and attending the Asian Games in China. The next year, the budget dropped to 11.21 billion rupees. Last March, when the budget was announced by the government, the sports minister, Ajay Maken, admitted that the decrease was "a matter of concern for us ... [T]he London Olympics programme may be impacted." Admittedly, small pockets of sporting excellence have started to spring up around the country. In Hyderabad, the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy has trained players such as Saina Nehwal, who won a bronze in the 2012 Olympics. Many of India's best boxers - including a bronze medallist in the 2008 Olympics - have trained at Bhiwani, a small town in the state of Haryana. But these examples have come about as a result of private initiative, rather than government programmes. The improvement in boxing, for example, was achieved after a former Indian boxer opened his own club, "taking boxing away from the government-run Sports Authority of India," said Shamya Dasgupta, a sports journalist and author of a new book called Bhiwani Junction: The Untold Story of Boxing in India. Only after the club's alumni began to do well internationally, Mr Dasgupta said, did the Haryana government step in, promising "great incentives in terms of money and jobs to achievers". Before the Olympics, Haryana announced a cash award of 25 million rupees for any athlete from its state who won gold. The government has also given boxers high positions in its police department, allowing them to train without worrying about a salary. In Bhiwani Junction, the incentives had started to pay off. During the 2010 Commonwealth Games, "15 of India's 38 golds at the event — nearly 40 per cent of the country's best-ever haul — were won by athletes from Haryana," Mr Dasgupta wrote. Other private initiatives such as the Mittal Champions Trust - funded by the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and dedicated to training a small pool of athletes in five sports - have also raised standards. But these pockets of quality cannot take sports to the masses, said K Arumugam, who runs Stick2Hockey.com, a hockey news website. India's decline in hockey has been particularly tragic. The Indian team won the hockey gold in five out of eight Olympics between 1948 and 1980. It failed to qualify for the Beijing Olympics and, this year, placed at the bottom of the competition in London. The way to improve India's performance in the Olympics, Mr Arumugam said, was not only to increase funding but also to improve sports policies, such as making sports part of the curriculum in schools and colleges. India's sports policies now are "hit-and-miss," said Mr Aiyar, the former sports minister. He cited the example of Ms Kom, the boxer who won a bronze in London. "Mary Kom was chopping wood because her family could not afford a gas cylinder to cook their food," Mr Aiyar said. "She has to go from there to being a boxer. It's as hit-and-miss as that." SSubramanian@thenational.ae Follow The National on & Samanth Subramanian on SBhattacharya@thenational.ae Follow The National on & Surya Bhattacharya on This article has been corrected since publication. Wrestler Yogeshwar Dutt was incorrectly identified as Sonjay Dutt.

India asks why it won so few Olympic medals

As the Olympics wound to a close the inevitable question started to be asked in India: why does a country with 1.2 billion people come away with so few medals, especially compared to smaller and poorer nations?