Key Highlights
- India’s national sports policy has historically operated as a top-down, centrally planned structure the Union government funds elite athletes through TOPS, runs Khelo India, and sets broad priorities, while states largely receive athletes already identified rather than systematically building the pipeline themselves. The result is a paradox: a country of 1.4 billion people that sent 117 athletes to Paris 2024 and returned with six medals, ranking 71st on the medal table — behind countries with a fraction of India’s population and a fraction of India’s sports budget.
- Yet the evidence that a different model works already exists within India’s own borders. Haryana, a state of 3 crore people, has produced six of India’s twenty-one individual Olympic medals across all sports in India’s Olympic history. Odisha’s decade-long hockey investment ₹150 Crore+ in sponsorship, two World Cups hosted, world-class infrastructure built in a Tier-2 city created the conditions for India’s Paris 2024 bronze. Kerala has appeared in the Santosh Trophy final 15 times and won it 7 times, while Kerala Blasters FC commands one of the largest football fan bases in Asia from a state with a GDP roughly comparable to Slovenia.
- The question is not whether state-led, sport-specific development works. It demonstrably does. The question is why India does not have a deliberate policy framework that identifies, resources, and multiplies this model across all 28 states and 8 union territories — assigning each a flagship sport with dedicated infrastructure, talent pipelines, professional league linkage, and measurable Olympic outcome targets.
- This blog is GSK’s policy framework for exactly that: a Federal Sports Development Model in which each Indian state “owns” one sport as its primary development mandate, creates the deepest possible talent ecosystem for that sport within its geography and cultural context, and connects that ecosystem to the national sports programme and commercial sports economy. It is not a radical idea. Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands have operated versions of it for decades. India simply hasn’t formalised what it already does accidentally into something it does by design.
Table of Contents
- The Paradox: A Billion People, Six Medals
- The Proof of Concept Already Exists in India
- Why Centralised Sports Policy Has Structural Limits
- The Federal Sports Model: How It Would Work
- State-Sport Mapping Framework: Assigning the Right Sport to the Right State
- What Each State Gains — and What India Gains
- How Commercial Sports Development Connects to the Federal Model
- Objections and Honest Answers
- FAQ: State Sports Policy Model India
- Conclusion: Build Where Culture Already Points
India does not have a sports talent problem. It has a systems problem.
The talent is visible everywhere — in Haryana’s wrestling akhadas where girls wake before sunrise to train on mud floors, in Kerala’s paddy-field football pitches where children grow up treating the ball as a natural extension of the body, in Manipur’s football culture that has sent a disproportionate number of players to the national team from a state of barely 30 lakh people, in the tribal communities of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh where archery and athletics are cultural inheritances rather than chosen sports. India is full of latent sporting excellence. What it lacks is the infrastructure, the investment continuity, and the institutional architecture to convert that latent talent into systematic international medals.
The Federal Sports Development Model is a policy framework built on a single insight: the conditions that produce elite athletes are not created by national programmes alone. They are created when geography, culture, infrastructure, economic incentive, and institutional attention converge on a specific sport in a specific place and are sustained long enough to produce a generational pipeline. Haryana didn’t produce six individual Olympic medal winners through TOPS or Khelo India. It produced them through a decades-long cultural, economic, and institutional convergence around combat sports that preceded any central government programme. The policy question is: how do you deliberately create that convergence everywhere, rather than waiting for it to happen by accident?
The Paradox: A Billion People, Six Medals
India’s Olympic underperformance relative to its population is one of sport’s most analysed statistical anomalies. At Paris 2024, India sent 117 athletes across 16 sports and won 6 medals — 1 silver, 5 bronze. The country ranked 71st on the medal table, down from 48th at Tokyo 2020. For context: the Netherlands, with a population of 17 million (1.2% of India’s), won 34 medals at Paris 2024. New Zealand, with 5 million people (0.36% of India’s), won 20 medals.
The explanations for this gap are well understood: cricket’s dominance of sports capital (87% of India’s sports market vs. 13% for all other sports combined), fragmented governance across dozens of largely dysfunctional sports federations, inadequate sports science and coaching infrastructure, the cultural deprioritisation of sports as a career pathway, and the absence of the school-to-club-to-professional pipeline that develops talent in high-performing Olympic nations.
These are real structural problems. But they share a common characteristic: they are mostly national-level problems whose solutions have been attempted mostly at the national level. And national-level solutions, in a country as vast and culturally diverse as India, are inherently limited in their ability to reach the specific geographies, communities, and sports contexts where the actual talent lives.
Cricket dominates the national conversation. But Neeraj Chopra is from Haryana. Lovlina Borgohain is from Assam. Bajrang Punia is from Haryana. Mirabai Chanu is from Manipur. PV Sindhu is from Telangana. The athletes who pull India’s Olympic medal tally are not produced by national programmes applied uniformly across India. They are produced by specific state-level sports cultures that happen to be stronger than average in a particular sport. The policy question is how to make that relationship intentional.
The answer is a Federal Sports Development Model.
The Proof of Concept Already Exists in India
Before proposing a new policy framework, it is worth understanding why the existing accidental version already works when conditions align.
Haryana and Wrestling: The Accidental Model
Haryana has a population of approximately 3 crore people — roughly the same as Venezuela or Malaysia. It has produced six of India’s twenty-one individual Olympic medals across all sports since independence: Sushil Kumar (2008 and 2012), Yogeshwar Dutt (2012), Sakshi Malik (2016), Bajrang Punia (2021), and Aman Sehrawat (2024). At Paris 2024, all five women’s wrestling qualifiers — Vinesh Phogat, Antim Panghal, Anshu Malik, Nisha Dahiya, and Reetika Hooda — were from Haryana.
This is not a coincidence. It is the product of a specific convergence that Haryana built, partly by design and partly through cultural momentum. The state has a deep traditional wrestling culture (kushti in akhadas has been practised in Haryana’s villages for generations), a government sports policy that offers substantial cash awards to medal winners (gold at Commonwealth Games: ₹1.5 Crore; Olympic medals scaled accordingly) and government jobs as incentives for athletic achievement, dedicated wrestling academies and facilities at the district level, and a social context in the late 1990s and 2000s where girls from agricultural communities saw wrestling as a viable path to financial independence and social mobility.
The result is a self-reinforcing system. Haryana produces medals. Medals produce role models. Role models produce the next generation of athletes. The next generation produces more medals. The infrastructure, incentives, and culture compound each other.
Odisha and Hockey: The Deliberate Model
Odisha’s hockey investment is the clearest example of a state government making a deliberate, sustained, measurable bet on a specific sport and generating Olympic returns on that investment.
The Odisha government’s sponsorship of the Indian men’s hockey team began in 2018 with a ₹120 Crore commitment for the 2018–2023 period. The partnership included jersey branding (“Odisha” on the national team’s shirt in every international match), the naming of the Birsa Munda Hockey Stadium in Rourkela, the hosting of two FIH Hockey World Cups (Bhubaneswar 2018, shared Odisha hosting 2023), and the development of the Naval Tata Hockey High Performance Centre with 12 grassroots training centres and over 2,500 athletes enrolled. The sponsorship was extended post-2023 with an enhanced ₹150 Crore+ commitment through 2033.
India won bronze at Tokyo 2020 — the country’s first Olympic hockey medal in 41 years. India won bronze again at Paris 2024. Both squads were substantially built on players who had moved through the Hockey High Performance Centre’s pipeline.
Odisha’s hockey investment is not purely altruistic. The economic case is demonstrable: Bhubaneswar and Rourkela have received tourism, hospitality, and infrastructure investment connected to the World Cups and high-performance centre operations. The state’s name has appeared in every international hockey broadcast globally since 2018. The tribal communities in Odisha — which have historically contributed hockey players at disproportionate rates — now have formal pathways into professional hockey where previously the connection was informal and underfunded. This is a state government deploying sports as an integrated development tool, not just a cultural nicety.
Kerala and Football: The Cultural Model
Kerala’s relationship with football is categorically different from either Haryana’s wrestling or Odisha’s hockey model. It is not primarily the product of government policy or deliberate institutional investment. It is a genuine cultural inheritance — football in Kerala, particularly in the Malabar region, was introduced during the colonial era by British officers of the Malabar Special Police and took root so deeply that FIFA itself documented it, releasing a film titled “Maitanam: The Story of Football in Kerala” with the line: “Football in the Indian state of Kerala runs through the fabric of its society, where football is life and life is football.”
Kerala’s Santosh Trophy record bears this out: 15 final appearances, 7 titles, most recently in 2022. Kerala Blasters FC, the ISL franchise based in Kochi, is supported by the “Manjappada” (Yellow Army) — a fan community that brings an atmosphere described by commentators as rivalling European football’s most intense supporter cultures. The club consistently sells out its home matches even while finishing outside the top positions.
Kerala’s football culture demonstrates what is possible when organic cultural enthusiasm for a sport aligns with organised club structures and a state-level competitive ecosystem. It also demonstrates the limitation of cultural enthusiasm alone: Kerala’s football talent, despite the depth of the cultural base, has not translated into proportional representation in the Indian national team or Olympic squads, partly because football’s Olympic pathway (through the men’s U23 tournament) requires infrastructure and international exposure that cultural enthusiasm alone doesn’t provide.
Why Centralised Sports Policy Has Structural Limits
India’s central sports policy apparatus TOPS, Khelo India, Khelo Bharat Niti 2025, SAI’s national training centres, the MYAS budget (₹3,794 Crore in FY2025-26) has achieved real things. TOPS-funded athletes have won Olympic medals. Khelo India has identified thousands of young athletes who would not previously have had institutional support. The Union Budget’s FY2026-27 sports allocation of ₹4,479 Crore with a 10-year Khelo India Mission announcement signals growing political commitment to sports as a development priority.
But centralised policy has structural limits that additional funding cannot resolve:
The geography problem. India has 640,000 villages. The talent in those villages — in the tribal communities of Jharkhand, the coastal fishing communities of Andhra Pradesh, the mountain settlements of Uttarakhand, the plains villages of Haryana and UP — is not reached by national programmes administered from Delhi and channelled through often-dysfunctional state-level intermediaries. Talent identification at the grassroots level requires sustained, district-by-district presence that only state governments can credibly deliver.
The cultural context problem. A national wrestling programme designed in Delhi will be less effective in Kerala, where wrestling has no cultural context, than in Haryana, where it has deep cultural roots. A national football programme will achieve more per rupee invested in Kerala than in Rajasthan. National programmes by definition cannot be culturally optimised for 28 states. State programmes can be.
The incentive alignment problem. Central government athletes receive TOPS funding and national team berths, but the incentives for a state government to invest in the development of athletes who then represent India — not the state — are diffuse. State governments that invest in sports get reputational credit only when their athletes win at the national level and the state connection is explicitly made. Most state governments have not made this calculation deliberately enough to sustain funding across election cycles.
The continuity problem. Central programme funding is subject to the political cycles of the Union government. State-level sports cultures — Haryana’s wrestling, Odisha’s hockey have proven more resilient to political change because they are embedded in the state’s identity and economic interests in a way that a centrally administered programme is not.
The Federal Sports Model: How It Would Work
The Federal Sports Development Model has five operating principles.
Principle 1: State Selection, Not Central Assignment. Each state identifies its flagship sport based on existing cultural affinity, performance data, geographic suitability, and development potential — not through central government mandate. Haryana already knows it is a wrestling state. Odisha has already chosen hockey. The framework provides the architecture; the state exercises the selection. Where a state has no obvious existing sporting identity, the framework provides selection criteria (see the mapping framework below).
Principle 2: One Flagship, One Decade. The commitment is not a four-year election cycle. It is a minimum 10-year investment horizon. The Odisha hockey model demonstrates why: the first Olympic returns came six years after the sponsorship commitment began. Sports development has a longer compounding horizon than most policy investments. States that commit to a sport for one election cycle and then move on have not made a sports policy — they have made an announcement. The framework requires a statutory minimum commitment period of 10 years, with outcome benchmarks at Year 3, Year 6, and Year 10.
Principle 3: Integrated Ecosystem, Not Single Investment. A flagship sport designation covers four integrated pillars: (a) Infrastructure — at minimum one national-standard facility in the state capital plus district-level training centres; (b) Talent pipeline — structured zonal identification, school integration, and academy pathway; (c) Professional connection a state-level professional league or franchise in the flagship sport linked to the national league ecosystem; (d) Commercial development — state government support for a sponsorship programme that attracts private capital and builds the sport’s commercial sustainability independent of public funding.
Principle 4: Olympic Outcome Targets, State-Level Accountability. Each state’s flagship sport programme sets explicit Olympic representation targets: X number of athletes qualifying for the next Olympics, X medals at national games, X international rankings achieved within the 10-year window. These targets are public, independently assessed, and linked (positively, not punitively) to continued central co-funding through the Khelo India programme.
Principle 5: Central-State Co-Funding Structure. The Union government provides a co-funding commitment — say, ₹1 Crore of central support for every ₹2 Crore of state investment in the flagship sport programme — up to a defined ceiling per state. This creates a matching incentive that rewards state commitment without making the programme entirely dependent on central funding. It also creates a direct financial mechanism through which states can access Khelo India money for sport-specific, locally designed programmes rather than only for centrally designed schemes.
State-Sport Mapping Framework: Assigning the Right Sport to the Right State
Not every state has a Haryana-style wrestling culture or an Odisha-style institutional will to make a bold bet. The mapping framework identifies which states are best positioned to develop which sports, using five criteria.
| Criterion | Weight | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Existing cultural affinity | 30% | Evidence of the sport’s presence in community life, grassroots participation, media attention at state level |
| Historical performance data | 25% | State’s track record in producing national-level athletes in the sport (Santosh Trophy finishes, national championship results, etc.) |
| Geographic and physical suitability | 20% | Climate, terrain, and physical characteristics of the state’s population that are advantageous for specific sports |
| Infrastructure gap vs. investment cost | 15% | How much infrastructure exists vs. what would be needed; lower gap = higher efficiency of investment |
| Commercial development potential | 10% | Potential for the flagship sport to generate sponsorship, tourism, and media revenue that sustains the programme commercially |
Applying this framework to India’s 28 states produces a working allocation. The following is illustrative rather than exhaustive — the actual mapping would require detailed state-level assessments.
| State | Proposed Flagship Sport | Primary Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Haryana | Wrestling | 6 of India’s 21 individual Olympic medals; all 5 Paris 2024 women’s wrestling qualifiers |
| Odisha | Hockey | ₹150 Cr+ state investment already operational; two World Cups hosted; Paris 2024 bronze pipeline |
| Kerala | Football | 7 Santosh Trophy titles; Kerala Blasters FC fan base; FIFA-documented football culture |
| Manipur | Football / Boxing | Consistent Santosh Trophy contender; multiple national boxing champions; strong combat sports tradition |
| Punjab | Hockey / Athletics | Historical hockey powerhouse; Milkha Singh legacy; strong middle-distance running tradition |
| Jharkhand | Archery | Deepika Kumari and multiple national archers; tribal communities with generational archery practice |
| Tamil Nadu | Chess / Table Tennis | Vishwanathan Anand legacy; growing chess culture; strong TT infrastructure in Chennai |
| Telangana | Badminton | PV Sindhu; Pullela Gopichand Academy; strong badminton infrastructure already in place |
| West Bengal | Football | Mohun Bagan and East Bengal as Asia’s oldest clubs; Kolkata’s deep football culture |
| Mizoram | Football | Won I-League 2017; entire state revolves around football; highest per-capita football participation |
| Himachal Pradesh | Winter Sports / Skiing | Geography-determined; India’s only viable platform for alpine and snow sports development |
| Uttarakhand | Mountaineering / Athletics | High-altitude training advantage; strong running tradition |
| Rajasthan | Shooting | Historical performance; Rajasthan has produced national shooting champions; ISSF infrastructure |
| Maharashtra | Athletics / Boxing | Mumbai Marathon ecosystem; strong boxing culture; large athlete population |
| Gujarat | Kabaddi | Traditional kabaddi base; growing PKL interest |
| Chhattisgarh | Hockey | Tribal heritage in contact sports; CHL 2026 as a pilot state-level professional league |
| Assam | Football / Rowing | Growing football culture; natural waterways for rowing development |
This is not an argument that states cannot support multiple sports. Punjab already supports both hockey and athletics. The framework simply argues that each state should have one sport it prioritises above all others — the sport it treats as its international identity, its primary Olympic investment, and its commercial sports development anchor.
What Each State Gains — and What India Gains {#gains}
The Federal Sports Model is not a sacrifice play where states invest in sports for the national good at their own expense. Each state has concrete, measurable reasons to make this commitment.
States gain brand identity. Odisha is now globally associated with hockey — not just within India, but through every international broadcast that shows “Odisha” on the Indian team’s jersey. This is international tourism marketing, industrial investment attraction, and cultural diplomacy at a fraction of what traditional marketing spend would cost. A state identified globally as the home of a specific sport has a brand positioning that money cannot easily replicate.
States gain economic multipliers. The CHL 2026 model projects ₹38.6 Crore in Year 1 economic impact for Chhattisgarh from a 13-day hockey league. The Odisha World Cups generated hospitality, infrastructure, and media investment orders of magnitude larger. A state that hosts a national championship or professional league in its flagship sport generates tourism, hospitality employment, infrastructure investment, and media value annually — not once.
States gain talent pipeline assets. An academy or training centre built for a flagship sport serves athletes for decades. The Naval Tata Hockey High Performance Centre is now a permanent piece of Odisha’s sports infrastructure. It will produce athletes for thirty years from a single capital investment.
States gain political capital. When athletes from the state win Olympic medals, chief ministers stand next to them at felicitation ceremonies. The political return on sporting investment is substantial and visible in a way that most policy investments are not. Haryana’s political establishment has invested in wrestling partly because winning wrestlers generate enormous political goodwill in communities where the sport is culturally central.
India gains structural Olympic depth. The current system concentrates Indian Olympic hopes on a small number of athletes supported by TOPS from a fragmented national talent base. A federal model, if implemented across 20 states over 10 years, would create 20 deep sport-specific talent pipelines feeding the national programme simultaneously. The cumulative effect on India’s Olympic medal count by 2036 — the year India has applied to host the Olympics — could be transformative.
How Commercial Sports Development Connects to the Federal Model {#commercial}
A state sports policy model that operates purely as a government expenditure programme is a welfare model. A state sports policy model that integrates commercial sports development — professional leagues, sponsorship, media rights, merchandise, and tourism — is a sustainable development model. The distinction matters enormously.
Odisha’s hockey model is instructive again. The state government’s sponsorship of the national team is not just a public expenditure — it has been structured as a commercial partnership with branding rights, broadcast integration, and sponsorship activation that generates returns measurable against the investment. The Hockey World Cup hosting was not purely public sector — it generated private sector hospitality, tourism, and media spending that substantially exceeded the public infrastructure investment.
The framework for integrating commercial development into the Federal Sports Model has three components:
State-Level Professional League. Each state with a flagship sport should have a professional league or franchise in that sport within the state boundaries. This is the CHL 2026 model applied universally: a state-level professional hockey league for Chhattisgarh, designed as a replicable template. Haryana could have a state-level wrestling league. Kerala could have a state-level football league feeding into the ISL ecosystem. The professional league creates year-round commercial activity, fan engagement, and media value around the flagship sport — not just during the Khelo India or national championship windows.
Flagship Sport Sponsorship Programme. Each state’s flagship sport programme should have a structured sponsorship package — just as Odisha structured its national team partnership — that attracts PSU and private sector brands with a business or commercial presence in the state to invest in the flagship sport as a marketing vehicle. The state government acts as the anchor sponsor; the sponsorship programme structures bring in commercial partners above that anchor.
Sports Tourism Integration. Championship events in the flagship sport — state-level professional leagues, national-qualifying rounds, school championships — become sports tourism products. The infrastructure built for the flagship sport can host other events. The fan culture built around the flagship sport drives hospitality and local retail spending that local governments can measure and promote.
GSK’s sports event management, sponsorship consulting, and academy development capabilities are specifically designed to support exactly this integrated model — state governments building flagship sport programmes that combine public development objectives with commercially sustainable structures. The CHL 2026 is our live case study. It is not a theoretical framework. It is a working model.
Objections and Honest Answers {#objections}
Any policy proposal that attempts to be genuinely useful must grapple with the strongest objections to it. Here are the four we hear most often, and our honest responses.
Objection 1: “Won’t this restrict athletes who want to pursue a sport that isn’t their state’s flagship?”
No — and this is an important clarification. The Federal Sports Model is about where state government invests, not about what individual athletes are permitted to pursue. An athlete in Haryana who wants to be a badminton player is not prevented from doing so. What the model creates is a state where the infrastructure, coaching, academies, incentives, and institutional attention are concentrated on wrestling. If the Haryana athlete wants to pursue badminton, they will need to seek those resources elsewhere — perhaps in Telangana, which has deep badminton infrastructure through the Gopichand Academy. The model creates specialisation, not restriction.
Objection 2: “Won’t small states be disadvantaged if they don’t have an existing sporting culture?”
Potentially, in the short term. But smaller states often have more distinctive sporting cultures, not fewer — Mizoram’s football obsession, Manipur’s combat sports tradition, Himachal Pradesh’s altitude sports advantage. Small states with a single flagship sport can achieve concentration of investment that large, diverse states cannot. Bihar hosting Khelo India Youth Games 2025 with 5,000+ athletes demonstrates that states without Olympic pedigree can build meaningful sports infrastructure quickly when political will exists. The co-funding mechanism in the model specifically supports smaller states by providing proportionally larger central contribution.
Objection 3: “India needs to develop multiple sports, not concentrate on one per state.”
This objection misunderstands the model. The Federal Sports Model is about where states concentrate their primary investment, not about banning all other sports. Maharashtra will still support boxing, football, cricket, and athletics. The model asks Maharashtra to designate one sport as its flagship — the one where it will build the deepest possible international-standard pipeline — rather than spreading thin resources across everything at a sub-optimal level for each. Concentration produces depth. Depth produces Olympic medals. And twenty states each producing Olympic-level depth in different sports creates more total medals than twenty states each producing amateur-level breadth across all sports.
Objection 4: “State governments change every five years. How do you sustain a ten-year commitment?”
This is the most serious objection, and it requires a structural rather than a hopeful answer. Three mechanisms can sustain continuity across election cycles. First, statutory anchoring: states that formalise their flagship sport designation in a state sports development act (rather than a ministerial order that can be reversed) create legal continuity that survives government changes. Second, institutional anchoring: once a world-class training centre is built, an academy is operational, and a professional league is running, the constituency for continuing the programme — athletes, coaches, franchise owners, sponsors, fans — creates political cost for any government that abandons it. Odisha’s hockey programme has survived one state government transition partly because the infrastructure and institutional relationships are real and visible. Third, commercial anchoring: a flagship sport programme with commercial partnerships, professional league revenues, and sponsorship income is partly self-sustaining regardless of state government will, because private sector participants have contractual interests in its continuation.
None of these mechanisms guarantees continuity. But the combination of statutory, institutional, and commercial anchoring is significantly more durable than relying on political goodwill alone.
FAQ: State Sports Policy Model India {#faq}
Q: What exactly is the “One Sport, One State” federal model?
It is a policy framework in which each Indian state designates one sport as its primary development priority and builds the deepest possible sports ecosystem around that sport — from grassroots identification at the district level through academy training, state-level professional competition, and national Olympic pipeline connection. The designation is based on the state’s existing cultural affinity, historical performance data, geographic suitability, and commercial development potential. The model does not prevent states from supporting other sports. It asks them to concentrate their flagship investment in one sport rather than spreading thin resources across all sports sub-optimally.
Q: Why does Haryana produce so many Olympic medal winners in wrestling?
Because Haryana has, largely by accident and partly by design, built the conditions that the Federal Sports Model would deliberately replicate: deep traditional wrestling culture in akhadas across rural communities, government cash awards and job incentives that make winning medals economically transformative, district-level infrastructure investment in wrestling facilities, and decades of role models who demonstrated that wrestling is a viable career pathway. Six of India’s 21 individual Olympic medals across all sports and all of India’s independence-era history belong to wrestlers from Haryana — a state of 3 crore people. The model asks: how do we build this deliberately for wrestling in Haryana, hockey in Odisha, football in Kerala, archery in Jharkhand, and so on across all 28 states?
Q: How does the Odisha hockey model serve as a template?
Odisha made a deliberate, sustained, measurable bet on hockey beginning with a ₹120 Crore sponsorship commitment for the national team in 2018. The investment included jersey branding on the national team, two FIH Hockey World Cup hosting rights (2018 and 2023), the Birsa Munda Hockey Stadium in Rourkela, and the Naval Tata Hockey High Performance Centre with 12 grassroots training centres and 2,500+ athletes. The investment was extended with a ₹150 Crore+ commitment through 2033. India won Olympic hockey bronze at Tokyo 2020 (first in 41 years) and at Paris 2024, with both squads built substantially through the Odisha pipeline. The Odisha model demonstrates that sustained, integrated state investment in a specific sport — with infrastructure, talent pipeline, and commercial structure working together — produces measurable Olympic returns within one Olympic cycle.
Q: Isn’t this what Khelo India already does?
Khelo India is a national programme that operates primarily at the identification and support level — identifying talented young athletes, providing stipends, and creating competition opportunities. It is not a state-specific, sport-specific deep investment model. Khelo India tells states “here are resources for your athletes across all sports.” The Federal Sports Model tells states “here is a framework for building the world’s best hockey programme (or wrestling, or football) within your geography, with central co-funding, statutory anchoring, and commercial development built in.” The two are complementary. Khelo India works better when states have deep sport-specific ecosystems it can identify talent from. The Federal Sports Model creates those ecosystems.
Q: Where does GSK’s work with CHL 2026 fit into this framework?
The Chhattisgarh Hockey League 2026 is, in many respects, the Federal Sports Model’s commercial and professional layer applied to one state. Chhattisgarh has tribal communities with hockey heritage, government VGF funding commitment of ₹3.5 Crore, a zonal talent identification programme covering all 33 districts, a 30% tribal athlete inclusion mandate, and a franchise-based professional league structured as a permanent annual institution rather than a one-off event. CHL is not just a sports property — it is a development programme with a commercial engine. That is what the Federal Sports Model’s state-level professional league component looks like in practice. If the model works for Chhattisgarh hockey, it can be replicated for Jharkhand archery, Manipur football, Himachal Pradesh winter sports, and every other state-sport pairing with the right conditions.
Q: Would this model actually move India up the Olympic medal table?
Over a 10-year horizon, substantially yes — but the number is less important than the structure. India’s core Olympic medal challenge is not insufficient funding at the top of the pyramid. It is insufficient depth at the base. TOPS and national centres fund the athletes who are already visible. The Federal Sports Model builds the pipeline that creates the athletes who aren’t yet visible, from the geographies and communities where Olympic talent is currently undiscovered. The compounding effect of 20 states each building one deep sport-specific pipeline simultaneously, over 10 years, feeding into an enhanced national programme supported by ₹4,000+ Crore central budget, is structurally capable of moving India from 6 medals to 20+ in the 2036 Olympics that the government has set as a target and that India is actively seeking to host.
Build Where Culture Already Points {#conclusion}
India’s sports talent does not need to be created. It already exists — in Haryana’s wrestling akhadas, in Kerala’s paddy-field football pitches, in Jharkhand’s tribal archery traditions, in Manipur’s football-obsessed communities, in the shooting ranges of Rajasthan and the badminton courts of Hyderabad. The question is never whether India has sporting talent. The question is always whether India has the institutional architecture to convert that talent into international achievement.
The Federal Sports Development Model is not a radical reimagining of Indian sports. It is a deliberate formalisation of what already works. Haryana didn’t need a national programme to produce wrestlers — it needed the cultural moment, the economic incentive, and the grassroots infrastructure to be present simultaneously. Odisha didn’t need a theoretical framework — it needed a government willing to make a sustained bet on a specific sport for a specific reason and structure that bet with enough commercial thinking to make it durable.
The model asks twenty-eight state governments to make a version of that bet. To look at their own geography, their own communities, their own cultural inheritance, and ask: what sport do our people already love? What sport gives our athletes a natural advantage? What sport has a pathway to the commercial sports economy that makes the investment sustainable beyond election cycles? And then to build — not broadly and thinly across everything, but deeply and deliberately in one direction.
The countries that dominate the Olympic medal table — the United States, Australia, Great Britain, the Netherlands — do not win medals through centralised national programmes alone. They win because they have hundreds of state-level, city-level, and community-level sports ecosystems that each specialise in something and contribute their best athletes upward to the national programme. India has 1.4 billion people and 28 states. The Olympic programme it needs is already latent in the country’s cultural geography. The Federal Sports Model is simply the architecture for making it real.
| State | Proposed Flagship Sport | Olympic Medal Potential (10-year) | Key Enabler Already Present |
|---|---|---|---|
| Haryana | Wrestling | High — 2-3 medals per cycle | Cultural infrastructure, government incentives |
| Odisha | Hockey | High — sustained pipeline operational | Naval Tata HPC, 2x World Cup hosting |
| Kerala | Football | Medium — Olympic pathway requires U23 development | Cultural base, ISL club infrastructure |
| Manipur | Football / Boxing | Medium-High — national champions regularly produced | Combat sports culture, multiple national champions |
| Jharkhand | Archery | Medium — Deepika Kumari pipeline established | Tribal archery tradition, Tata Archery Academy |
| Telangana | Badminton | High — Gopichand Academy world-class | PV Sindhu legacy, existing academy infrastructure |
| Mizoram | Football | Long-term — I-League title 2017 validates potential | Highest per-capita football culture in India |
| Chhattisgarh | Hockey | Building — CHL 2026 as pilot | Tribal athlete heritage, CHL 2026 professional foundation |
If you are a state government, a sports development authority, or a private investor thinking about the intersection of sports development and state identity — and you want to understand what building a flagship sport programme actually looks like in practice — GSK has built one. The CHL 2026 is the template. Our sports event management, grassroots academy development, infrastructure consulting, and sponsorship strategy capabilities are available to any state that is ready to make a serious, sustained, commercially structured bet on its flagship sport.
Contact us at info@globalsportskonnect.com or book a conversation at calendly.com/globalsportskonnect. Follow GSK on LinkedIn for weekly analysis on the Indian sports ecosystem. The 2036 Olympic window is open. Ten years is exactly the right horizon to build from.