The reasons for this state of affairs are as listed below. Sports is often viewed as an extra curricular activity by majority of adults in India. The children are discouraged to pursue sports and pushed towards academics from an early age. Youth who have the talent often use sports to secure admissions at universities or better jobs instead of pursuing it as passion.
Since it is not given the deserved respect and importance, the infrastructure for practicing a sport lacks in majority of schools in India. Not just in schools but the public sports grounds too are not very well maintained in many towns and villages. The youth do not choose to pursue a sport professionally because the rewards or even payment for them is measly or none.
This condition is existing for almost all the games in India except for Cricket. I was seated next to this really tall guy who looked very athletic. He was flying back home after a glorious win. In the past three decades, it has won only one gold medal - for the men's 10m rifle in In London, in , it bagged its best haul, six medals, or one for every million people.
In , it got just three medals. Before that, it was lucky to come home with a single medal. Compare India's performance with minnows such as Grenada and Jamaica, which regularly get a medal for every couple of hundred thousand people. India, despite its space programme and burgeoning population of billionaires, is still a very poor nation in terms of per capita income, and sport has never been a priority for the government, according to Shiva Keshavan. Keshavan is far and away India's greatest Winter Olympian.
He competes in luge, a kind of super-fast sledge. In two of the past five Winter Games, he was the only Indian to qualify, the only member of a team of one. Yet his ticket to Sochi was paid not by the Indian government but by crowdfunding.
And the lack of government - or any other - funding has also seen Keshavan adopt an eye-poppingly dangerous training regime. And I actually went to companies before one of them said yes. He believes the chronic lack of resources has undermined his performance, and that of most other Indian athletes. Many reasons like government apathy and lack of infrastructure have been ascribed to this abysmal performance. There can be no doubt that India lacks world-class infrastructure for sports.
But is the government apathy the only reason for this sad state of affairs? Then what makes poor countries that are smaller than an average Indian district produce more Olympic golds in a single Olympics than we have earned since the beginning of modern Olympics? The reason may lie in our culture and tradition. The privileged of India had never placed any value on sports or adventure. The caste system glorified intellectual achievements over physical ones. We are not overflowing with Nobel laureates and genius inventors; even in that, we have a ridiculously low achievement rate.
Physical labour and activities were always meant for the so-called lower castes. Thanks to the rigidity of the caste system, group sports activities involving people from varied backgrounds were and are still rare.
The elite of India never placed a premium on adventure or sports. We have a long coastline, yet we have no culture of surfing or deep-sea diving for leisure. Indian beaches have more number of fully clothed people eating fried savouries than swimming. We have snow-clad mountains, but very few take up skiing. Kayaking or sailing for leisure has never been mainstream despite the abundance of lakes and rivers.
Since the elite has never bothered about anything that requires a fraction of adventure, the governments are in no hurry to create facilities for the same. This cultural conditioning reflects in the way the schools and parents treat sports. The first thing to get banned for many children when they reach the 10th or 12th standard is their participation in sports. A state-level gold medal winner in athletics gets far less coverage in the media than a student scoring the first rank in some competitive examination.
Parents would rather have their wards get admission to some mediocre engineering college than in a reputed sports academy. One may argue this is a middle-class phenomenon. Then the question arises about why our society is not producing any sports icons from the underprivileged?
0コメント