Game on

India should take heart from the CWG tally

A tally of 61 medals puts India at fourth spot among all participating nations at the recent Commonwealth Games (CWG), one place lower and five medals fewer than its showing at the 2018 edition of the games in Gold Coast, Australia. Yet, despite trailing its 2018 record, the CWG performance had much for the country to celebrate. For one, India is not only the most populous country among the 14 Commonwealth nations (11 if Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland were added to England as the United Kingdom) but towards the bottom in terms of (nominal) per capita income, ranking third from the lowest place (only Kenya and Nigeria are below it). Given the direct link between a country’s sporting success and wealth and resources — which is why the US consistently leads Olympic medal tallies —this is no small achievement. For another, this edition of the CWG did not include shooting, which has been India’s forte traditionally. In the Gold Coast edition, India won 16 medals in shooting alone — seven golds, four silvers, and five bronzes — so there is no gainsaying that India may well have outperformed its 2018 best this time had the discipline been included. In that respect, maiden medal wins — including a gold in lawn bowling — deserve kudos. Also worth celebrating is that India topped the individual discipline medal tally in wrestling, weightlifting, badminton, and table tennis (including para TT).

A more granular view of these big numbers reflects the tremendous social mobility of both the winners and participants, which is certainly worth celebrating in this 75th year of independence. Most noticeable is the achievement of women: They won not just in sports in which women participate traditionally — badminton, cricket, hockey, and table tennis — but also in boxing, judo, weightlifting, and wrestling. All told, women won 31 of the 61 medals. Encouraging, too, is the social profile of some of the winners. Not all of them come from rich or middle-class backgrounds. Many are from modest families that have struggled to provide the necessary training and nutrition that go into creating top athletes. The 3,000-metre steeplechase silver medallist Avinash Sable, for instance, is the son of a farmer from a drought-prone district in Maharashtra. Boxing gold medallist Amit Panghal comes from a middling-income farm family. The father of Nitu Ganghas, another boxing gold medallist, works as a bill messenger. Sport has often been the most rapid medium of social mobility worldwide, much of it fostered by active government support.

This is less true in India, where sportspeople, poor or rich, mostly deploy their own resources and resourcefulness. Major private-sector funding is still oriented towards cricket but public-sector companies, as also the defence forces, still pitch in for other sportspeople. The traditional akhadas of the north have played their part in putting Indians on the world wrestling-map. But overall, funding support for sportspeople remains perfunctory. The big difference perhaps is that both the Centre and state governments have invested in world-class training facilities in recent years. In a country where public-spending priorities are always contested, this is no small step, raising hopes of a great leap forward for India in global sporting competitions.