editorials

distance of international standards. Predictably, the organisers of the CWG and sports officials have tried to use the performance of the Indian sportspersons to gloss over the poor organising and crass corruption of the games. A look at the achievements of the athletes, their training and background, reveals that whatever has been accomplished by India at the CWG has largely been achieved despite the governments and sports officials, and not because of them. The sustained neglect of sports in India is well-documented. Even as late as 2007, the central budget for all sports was less than Rs 500 crore, and of this money a neat Rs 150 crore was allocated to the CWG! The sports budget rose seven times in the last two years entirely on account of money which was allocated to the infrastructure and other requirements of the CWGs benighted Organising Committee. Indian sportspersons, even those who are at the top of their game and compete for the country in international tournaments, do not get international-level facilities to practise. Many states still do not have even a single astro-turf hockey field despite it being the national game. If this is the situation with regard to the national game, things are far worse in other sports. As the benchmark for basic infrastructure for each sport has risen globally, India has fallen further behind. Even now, rather than investing in improving facilities for the medal winners, governments are announcing unproductive sops like free luxury train travel, cars, etc. Added to the lack and poor quality of sports infrastructure is the incompetence, corruption and callousness of the sports administrators and many coaches. Sports federations are run like medieval fiefdoms to corner the budgets and distribute patronage. The fact that politicians are so keen to control sports bodies is the clearest evidence that they have become institutions for power-mongering rather than to incubate sports. Coaches have little incentive to invest in their wards and they themselves often lack basic training. At times they take the easy route of encouraging the use of performance-enhancing drugs. This is rarely taken seriously by the sports administrators and even when doping is discovered, the tendency is to push it under the carpet. The athletes are negle cted, and even harassed, sometimes sexually. This is so common now that even when it makes news, it is dismissed in a small column in the inside pages of the newspapers, soon to be forgotten.

There have been, fortunately, a handful of coaches and sports training institutes which have gone against this depressing trend. Often one dedicated coach like Satpal Singh who has coached wrestlers in Delhis Najafgarh, or Jagdish Singh who runs the Bhiwani Boxing Club, or Pulella Gopichand who runs a badminton academy in Hyderabad has nurtured talent and produced more sporting success than the entire sports body of that discipline. Significantly, most of them have remained unacknowledged. Similarly, one training institution of the Sports Authority of India, the Patialia-based Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports, has nurtured 38 of the 101 medal winners since it manages to run with a modicum of purpose. A social profile of the athletes who did well in the CWG indicates that many come from families which struggle to make ends meet. One medal winners mother reported how she missed meals to enable her daughter to get two full meals a day; anothers father spoke of how he had to take loans for basic equipment and travel for his son. More than half of the medal winners (56) are women, while many are from castes and communities which have struggled for social recognition through education, jobs and status, and their sporting successes seem to be driven by these same forces. At the other end of the spectrum are athletes who can ignore pressing matters of livelihood and access the best of training and facilities with their private means. In both these very different situations it is the individual drive of the sportsperson and her family, which accounts for success and not the efforts of the government or the official sports bodies. No credit then can go to either the government or the sports bodies for the performance at the CWG. Pursuit of sports in India has largely become a private matter either at the individual level, as the successes in the CWG show, or when privatised at the corporate level, like with cricket. The poverty of Indian sports, despite the relatively better showing in the CWG, shows how inadequate the former method of building sportspersons is, while the corruption and fixing in cricket are ample warning of the dangers of handing over sports to the imperatives of private profit. As long as this state of affairs continues, India will remain a straggler in sports, with a few honourable exceptions.
to show up Mobutu for what he is, a political unscrupulous and ambitious man with a very uncertain hold on his men. The prospects of a return to normalcy are, however, being badly retarded by the re- appearance of the Belgians in the Congo. It is now estimated that, in one guise or another, more Belgians are living in Leopoldville today than they were in July. Mr Hammarskjoeld has twice protested to Belgium about this invasion; and it is of scant use for Brussels to pretend that such a large-scale movement back to the Congo could have taken place without its sanction and help. One had thought Belgium had learnt its lesson in the Congo; but apparently it has not.

From 50 Years Ago

Vol XIi, No 44, october 29, 1960

weekly notes

Congos Troubles
In its own confused and blundering way, the situation in the Congo has served to establish two facts: that there is no alternative to the effective restoration to power of Mr Lumumba and Mr Kasavubu; and that no progress of any sort is possible unless the totally irresponsible

and lawless soldiers of the Congolese Army are disbanded. Shri Rajeshwar Dayal, the Chief UN Representative in Leopoldville, sees this clearly; and it will be surprising if the world, through the United Nations, is not soon faced with the decision to back him on these points. That Mr Lumumba was the only Congolese leader with any nationalist following in the country was never seriously in doubt... Colonel Mobutus emergence as the strong man of the army had aroused vague hopes in some anti-Lumumba quarters that at least the chaos will be dispelled, even if nothing democratic or parliamentary emerged afterwards. But a very short time has been enough

Economic & Political Weekly EPW october 23, 2010 vol xlv no 43