Endangered Sports In India.

Sports in India is, was and always be the binding thread of the whole nation, a common religion which the whole nation follows ardently and common link which engulfs the whole nation into the fervour of winning and disheartening of losing. Whether the players are hindu, muslim, Christian, sikh etc. but whenever their feet touch the ground and the audience blooms into enthusiasm, all the players discard their own entity and altogether form a team which only has one religion, the religion of nationalism.

If we talk about sports then in India, there are a lot of problems in India related to sports. In India, sports and cricket can be substituted for each other. People think that sports are only limited to cricket and nothing else. We just perceive cricket as the mother of all the sports and that nothing is beyond sports and this notion continues to eradicate the efficiency of India in other arenas of sports.

As the FIFA World Cup 2014 is to be started today, it’s a thing of embarrassment that India can’t even make an appearance at the football gala and not only in football, in other sports too we continue to give bad performances. It’s a pretty derogatory thing that India till now had won only 26 medals at Olympic, a nation of 1.237 billions continue with only 26 medals at Olympics what’s more is that Michael Phelps II of United States, best swimmer of all time, has a tally of 22 medals. Is not that a pretty shameful thing?

But what continues to drive India out of excellence in these sports? A simple answer to problem will be complete indifference shown by the authority and the government towards other sports. Today India continues to field one of the greatest crickets team of the whole world but we still have to cover a long way to go ahead and produce better players in other sports. What’s more painful is that the authorities don’t want other sports to come in the mainstream. This can be made clear from my this example- Indian Hockey team has won around 11 medals at the Olympics but today the condition of the hockey players in India is of poignancy and misery. Today hockey players in India even struggle to make the both ends meets while cricket players continue to earn upto crores for just one match. Not only in hockey India continues to be defeated in games like Tennis, football, basketball etc. just because of two reasons.

The first and foremost reason is the lack of incentive. Indian hockey players, basketball players, volleyball players and many other players continue to be in a very pathos condition just because they are not even paid for playing a game. Controlling boards of these game don’t even have money to buy the players complete branded kit to play against highly efficient teams of the world. Same thing continues to happen with other sports too. In gymnastic, basketball, swimming etc. we are not even have sufficient funds to help our players arrange for simple necessities of the game. Lets talk about football in this matter. Football players today are in worse condition. In places like West Bengal many players who used to be prominent in their times today run errands, distributed newspapers etc., the government is not even ready to help these former players make the both hands meet. This at last shakes the confidence of many budding players who abandon the sports, even some highly talented players at last are forced to leave the game. Today hockey players of India are in an inexplicably bad condition.

The next thing on which I would like to focus on is the lack of infrastructure. Even today there continue to be a lack of stadiums of football, hockey, gymnastics etc. and a dearth of polls for swimming and other sports. This continues to pose serious problems in the way of those who want to play. Today there is a humongous lack of good stadiums of different sports in the whole nation and this prevents children who want to play the sports from playing the game of their choice and at last children are devoid of so many good characteristics just because of that.

In addition to this there is a lack of good sports coaches too. There are only a handful of world standard sports coaches in India, others merely qualify for the high standards and that’s one of the main reason behind India’s 154 position in the FIFA ranking.

Collectively all these problems pose a big threat to the existence of different sports and also to the appearance of India in competitions of various games and if today the government doesn’t scrap away it’s apathetic behaviour then the nation would be at a huge loss.

Jai Hind,Jai Bharat

Jai Ma Bharti.