State of the art

With the deftness of a mountain rally veteran, the cab driver weaves his way through the heavy Gwalior traffic. The inadequate roads in this bustling town of over a million gives an illusion that there are more vehicles than souls out in the streets.

As the destination approaches, ‘inadequate’ becomes ‘non-existent’, and the city suddenly looks every bit part of the ‘M’ of BIMARU states. It’s difficult to imagine that at the other end of this dug-up alleged road is a top-class sporting facility — one that is on it’s way to be a symbol of a rapidly developing, 21st century Madhya Pradesh.

The sprawling MP State Women’s Hockey Academy is one of the aggressive initiatives across disciplines taken by the state government to put the province prominently on the country’s sporting map. Established in 2007, the academy is home to 52 girls. It has a hockey field, equipped with a state-of-the-art synthetic turf and floodlights. With the state government taking care of their expenses as well as education, hockey is the only thing on the the minds of the girls.

Indian men’s hockey team coach Michael Nobbs takes a day off from national duty to visit the academy and experience the facilities first hand. “It’s as good as where the men’s national team was training in Bangalore,” Nobbs says. “The Australian Institute of Sports also started like this,” he adds, referring to the high performance centre Down Under, established in 1981, that is often credited with transforming the country into a global sporting superpower.

For MP, global domination will have to wait. The job at hand is to compete with, if not fare better than, other more prosperous states. The encouraging thing is that it’s happening. The academy is beginning to produce quality players on a conveyor belt. With half a dozen players from this institution having represented India in the last couple of months, it’s safe to say it could become MP’s answer to Haryana’s famous hockey hub Shahbad.

That, however, is only one box ticked. To really rival, and eventually usurp, the likes of Haryana — a state whose athletes won 15 out of India’s 38 gold medals at the Delhi Commonwealth Games — across disciplines, more needs to be done. And more, indeed, is being done.

The beginning

It all started when Yashodhara Raje Scindia became the state’s Minister of Sports and Youth Welfare when BJP came into power in 2007. As a portfolio, sports has traditionally been looked down upon even in the Union Cabinet. During the era of jumbo cabinets in Uttar Pradesh in the late 90s and early 2000s, a joke doing the rounds was that the khelkood vibagh (roughly translated as sports activity ministry) should be spilt up into two — a khel mantri and a kood mantri — to accommodate one more candidate.

However, for Scindia, an avid sports enthusiast, it was a dream job. “I saw it as an opportunity to get involved with something I always loved,” she says. Her stint lasted only 13 months, as she moved to Lok Sabha, but the time was enough for her to set the wheels in motion. Four years later, the state government still sees sport as great advertisement for good governance and continues to pump money into it.

Right behind the hockey academy, an indoor badminton facility, along the lines of Pullela Gopichand’s academy in Hyderabad, is coming up. Once complete, it will have two international and four practice courts. In fact, the government has roped in Gopi as chief coach and consultant of the academy.

Similarly, in Bhopal, the state’s Department of Sports and Youth Welfare (DSYW) has set up a shooting academy. Mhow already boasted of a world class facility, but that belonged to the Services. So the state government came up with one on the outskirts of the capital, under international marksman Mansher Singh’s guidance.

As you approach the 56-acre compound, situated aptly on Abhinav Bindra Marg, the concrete jungle gives way to farmland. The prevailing silence is pierced intermittently as budding Bindras fire rounds after rounds. Last month, the metaphorical bang was heard as far as Doha, where the academy’s shooters won 11 medals in senior and junior categories — with Rajkumari Rathore winning a gold in 50m Prone, but losing out on an Olympic quota in 3-positions by a single point.

Although delivering impressive results, the aforementioned hockey, badminton and shooting academies, however, don’t quite capture MP’s aspirations as emphatically as perhaps its two other endeavours do: water sports and equestrian academies.

Wide base

After all, every state boasts of hockey grounds — if not quite floodlit ones — and badminton halls, and while shooting ranges are not so common, the recent Indian exploits have made it a popular sport to latch on to. But it’s the seriousness with which MP has taken up relatively lesser-known disciplines that drives home the point.

For an outsider, it’s difficult to picture this landlocked state as a hub of rowing, sailing, kayaking or dragon boat racing, but that is until you take an evening stroll to the picturesque Badi Jheel. Unmindful of the tourist cruise boats, a bunch of serious-looking men and women are paddling their plank-shaped boats hard in a quiet corner of the 31 sq km water body.

These are athletes from the state’s Water Sports Academy going about their daily training routine. In four years, MP has become a force to reckon with in water sports, with the state team lifting the National Kayaking and Canoeing title in Bangalore last year. One of the rowers, Monalisa Chanu, in fact, has also won gold at the junior Asian meet in China.

For the state, however, an even more unorthodox step than taking up water sports was to set up an equestrian academy, a sport almost exclusive to the Services or the ones with blue blood. The sprawling 25-acre facility, one of a kind, has 30 horses and 26 students — girls and boys, all from middle or lower-middle class.

Brig (retd) DVS Bishnoi, formerly of the Equestrian Federation of India and now in-charge of the academy, says: “Initially, when we used to take our teams to various competitions, people used to laugh at us. Now that our teams have won junior national polo and various horse shows, they don’t.”

Hired guns, not quite

Despite all these achievements, one charge that MP often faces is about their top performers being imported from other states. The likes of Monalisa Chanu and P. Sushila Chanu (hockey), both originally from Manipur, aren’t exceptions but norms.

Scindia explains: “When we started out, the ratio of local and outsiders was 50:50. We would conduct trials and select players and train them at our academies, and they would then go on to represent Madhya Pradesh.”

This process of polishing uncut stones into finished products sounds reasonable — at least more reasonable than handing out bucketfuls of ghee and car keys to the Gagan Narangs and Saina Nehwals on the grounds that their ancestors were from Haryana.

Amid a growing clamour for local sportsmen, however, DSYW has decided to increase the ratio to 90:10. The belief that it will be sustainable, that MP has enough talent pool to feed its academies without a drop in results, stems from the fact that in the last four years, a lot of work has been done at grassroots as well.

Top-down & bottom-up

The sports department has married both top-down and bottom-up approaches: while academies were being set up, the government also launched a scheme to promote sports at the lowest level by appointing paid khel samanvayaks (sports coordinators) at the village and block levels to train youngsters and organise events. It would turn out to be a spiritual predecessor to an ambitious project that the Centre launched one year later (2008-09) — the PYKKA (Panchayat Yuva Khel aur Kreeda Abhiyan).

All that, of course, has required funds, and MP put its money where the mouth is. Before 2007, MP’s budget for sports was a paltry Rs 5 crore; last year, it had climbed to Rs 71 crores. In the corresponding period, MP’s medal tally in National Games also ballooned up from 63 (Guwahati) to 103 (Ranchi).

“There has been an exponential growth in terms of medals won by our athletes in the last four years. Now we want to take it to the next level. We want to host international events and make the state a hub of sports in the country. I think we are moving in the right direction,” says state sports director Shailendra Shrivastava.

In a country that has traditionally believed in first bagging rights for mega sporting events such as the Commonwealth Games, then creating infrastructure and finally focusing on preparing athletes, MP has indeed chosen the right path: the other way round.