Sports Future Directions

Olympics have closed. Today's newspapers are full of praise for our medal winners. These sports persons richly deserve the accolades that are being showered on them.

However for deciding our long term sports policy we have to move away from the medal mania.

The vision for Indian Sports should be linked to physical fitness and consequently mental wellbeing of our people. Medals in competitive games will be a natural outcome. Our greater focus should be on non-competitive part of the Sports.

Vision is to create a sports culture in the country.

We should aim to achieve 5 hours of sports activity for every person every week.

Benefits will be in terms of better health, lower sickness, reduced expenses on medical care, longevity, lower absenteeism and improved productivity. Indirectly it will also reduce crime rate as more people are occupied.

We need investment in sports facilities. Currently we find a large number of sports facilities are with educational institutions - schools, colleges and universities. It leads to good utilization but not full utilization. These institutions should be mandated to offer their sports facilities to the neighbouring citizens for a reasonable charge for about 12 hours a week after drawing a schedule.
There would be good demand for swimming pools, tennis courts, badminton courts,  TT rooms, squash courts and billiards etc.

Private investment in sports is lopsided. In NCR Region, I find more number of Golf courses are made rather than football and cricket fields. I have nothing against golf. But over investment in Golf drives out space for other sports. Golf is seen as a sports for rich and old people. They should also get their share. But need is to have a balance between needs of all categories.

There is need for making the town planning rules more explicit by mandating private developers to provide for children's play grounds, young persons' facilities like cricket/ football grounds, volleyball and basketball courts etc.

First written on August 23, 2016.