Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (42 page)

The transcripts appear to show several of the nation’s most respected journalists offering to write pieces favoring Vaishnavi clients and obsequiously
promising to cast them in the best possible light. “What kind of story do you want?” asks one prominent journalist. “It can’t seem too slanted, yet it is an ideal opportunity to get all the points across.” Asks another: “What should I tell them?” (Full disclosure: I know Radia well and dealt with her frequently when she was at Vaishnavi. Among the recorded conversations published in
Open
was one between Radia and me in which I explained that I would not be writing columns for a while because I was on holiday and joked with her about missing a Michael Jackson concert in London.)

What startled an entire nation was not the cozy relationship among the elite, but rather the cravenness with which media leaders appeared willing to morph into pliant accomplices of the commercial and political powers that be. Worse, many of India’s mainstream media outlets refused to cover this burgeoning scandal at the time, and the public had to turn to social media to find out what was happening.

Why did India’s fourth estate so undermine the credibility it had taken years to build? Apparently some media owners wanted to travel in the same circles as the industrialists they were meant to cover. The more fundamental cause, however, is that the very abundance of media outlets has created competitive pressures that can make survival dependent on holding on to the advertising business of powerful corporations as well as on pandering to the lowest common denominator in audience taste. In addition, many media companies have significant investments from corporate conglomerates that seem to seek not just financial returns but also influence over coverage of their companies and the issues that are central to their success. With such rampant conflicts of interest, it is little wonder that the integrity of journalism is often compromised.

In India today we have media ownership without accountability; commercial considerations and political ambitions rather than a sense of moral obligation to inform the public drive coverage. How can India’s relatively young democracy thrive with a media that has so little anchoring in truth? How can the electorate make informed choices when news is often little more than thinly disguised advertising? Such is the reality of India’s media that no one in government—or, for that matter, within media itself—is willing to confront this ghastly reality.

The good news is that the Radia tapes helped the public understand what has happened to the news media. At the same time, competitive pressures are pushing some media outlets to the wall. No market can sustain so many channels even if many are run for motives beyond financial return, so a shakeout and then consolidation are inevitable.

This transformation could not come at a better time. As was demonstrated in the Radia episode, the awakened youth of India are employing social media to hold the old media to account. Social media have also emerged as sources of the development stories that the mainstream media often ignores because it is either too lazy to investigate or too satisfied by the profits that come from less-serious coverage.

The Indian news media must go through a catharsis and question its basic principles, particularly its practices for both gathering and then publishing the news. More emphasis on the craft of real journalism than on craftiness of garnering profits in the short term could help trigger the second coming of Indian media. The first signs of this rebirth are already visible. Two newly launched magazines,
Open
and the
Caravan
, encourage long-form narrative journalism as well as pursuing in-depth reporting on the issues they cover.

In the long run, the true value of any media organization is the trust its customers in particular and also society in general place in it. India’s fourth estate may have lost sight of that in the past decade or so, but we have every reason to hope that it can reassume its traditional role in reinforcing India’s democracy.

Geet Sethi

Geet Sethi is an international billiards champion and cofounder of Olympic Gold Quest, a foundation for the promotion of sports in India.

A few weeks before the 2012 Olympic Games were due to kick off in London, the pistol ace Vijay Kumar, one of India’s top shooters, felt unsure about the wooden grip on his Pardini semiautomatic pistol. Had an Indian shooter been caught in a similar situation at a previous Olympics, he might have had to write off his medal dreams. Instead, Kumar was able to call up our private organization, Olympic Gold Quest, and get the funds he needed to buy a new, customized grip. Kumar went on to win a silver medal in the twenty-five-meter rapid-fire competition—one of six medals for India at the London games.

If India is to become a true Olympic power, such private sector support for athletes will be critical. In London, Olympic Gold Quest also secured the services of the renowned coach Charles Atkinson for five-time world women’s boxing champion MC Mary Kom; we funded the badminton star Saina Nehwal’s stay at a hotel next door to Wembley Stadium, so she could avoid the ninety-minute commute from the Olympic Village. Such assistance may seem trivial, but for athletes competing at the highest level globally, it can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Private efforts alone, however, will not transform India’s national sports culture enough to qualify India as a credible Olympic threat. Real change can come only from a unified national push.

India’s Olympic record has improved steadily since the Atlanta games
in 1996, where the Bengali tennis star Leander Paes won our nation’s first medal, a bronze in singles. India won its first women’s medal in 2000, its first individual silver in 2004, and its first individual gold in 2008. India’s six medals in London—which included two silver and four bronze—represented a new record for our nation.

And yet, relative to our size, our achievements in London were modest. Out of seventy-nine total medal rankings, India, with the world’s second-largest population and tenth-largest economy, ranked fifty-fifth in the International Olympic Committee’s official medal table—ahead of Mongolia with five medals, but behind Grenada, Uganda, and Venezuela, each of which won a gold medal. Even North Korea matched our total medal count.

And India’s performance in London paled in comparison to that of the United States and China. The United States, with only a third as many people as India, claimed 104 Olympic medals (46 of them gold), while China, with a population roughly the same size as ours, swept 88 medals (38 of them gold).

To many, the notion that India might one day bring home as many medals as the United States or China might seem a fantasy. One in three Indians lives below the poverty line; for hundreds of millions of Indians, the quest is for
roti
,
kapda, aur makaan
(food, clothing, and shelter)—not Olympic gold. Even for more affluent Indians, athletic accomplishment is rarely a high priority. And democratic India will never embrace the Chinese model of selecting future athletes from infancy and pressing them into rigorous state-funded sports academies.

It’s worth asking why a country still struggling to provide adequate nutrition, employment, and health care to such a large swath of its citizens should expend resources on competing in the Olympics. For rich nations like the United States, international sporting contests are an affordable indulgence financed by private sponsors. For an authoritarian nation like China, Olympic success helps bestow legitimacy and prestige on unelected ruling elites, and can be funded by official edict. But for a poor and democratic nation like India, why should the pursuit of Olympic prowess be considered anything more than an exercise in national vanity?

The most obvious answer is that enthusiasm for the Olympics can help foster a national culture of sport, contributing to the general health of all. As far back as 1951 India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, lamented the fact that the country had largely neglected athletic competition as a national and social activity. “Athletic contests are good from the point of view of developing friendly rivalry among the youth of the nations,” he said. “We have to aim at the physical fitness of the entire nation and, more especially, of the youth of the nation. This fitness can only be achieved if we aim high.” Yet after six decades, India’s policy makers continue to ignore the importance of physical education and sport in our schools.

No less important, in my view, is that Indians, as much as the citizens of any other nation, need heroes and role models—champions whose achievements affirm our collective identity, encourage us to transcend our myriad differences in religion, caste, ethnicity, and language, and inspire us to greatness as a nation. Sport, like almost nothing else, has the power to unite us. It brings us all to the arena where, as fellow Indians, we can rally around our athletes, cheer them on as one, and take common pride in their achievements.

Indians from all walks of life can take pride in—and draw hope from—stories of Indian athletes like Mary Kom, the daughter of rural laborers from a poor tribal community in the northeastern state of Manipur, whose discipline and determination enabled her to win a bronze medal in women’s boxing in London; or Saina Nehwal, the daughter of a middle-class Jat family in Haryana, who won a bronze medal in badminton in London and has become India’s highest-paid athlete outside of cricket.

Competitive sports have finally become accessible to all strata of Indian society—not just the rich. Our hockey players emerge from the slums of Mumbai, archers from lower- and lower-middle-class backgrounds from the tribal belts, boxers and wrestlers from the rural heartlands. Many have realized that success in sports is a passport to upward social mobility.

India’s young and rapidly growing population is creating an unparalleled pool of potential Olympic athletes. One in three Indians is younger
than twenty years old. By 2020, it is expected that 325 million people will reach working age. If even half a percent of India’s young population decides to play recreational sports, India will boast a pool of 1.62 million kids from which to draw potential athletes. If 10 percent of that pool could be inspired to play at the competitive level, and if 10 percent of those athletes then could be trained for global competition, India would have more than sixteen thousand potential Olympic athletes. And the pool could be far larger if we make sport a way of life for the majority of the country.

How much might India hope to improve its Olympic performance? It is not impossible to imagine that in the 2020 summer games, India could claim twenty medals. That achievement, though more than triple our London record, would equal the London medal counts of the Netherlands and Ukraine—and should be sufficient to place India comfortably into the top fifteen medal-winning nations in 2020.

Of course, Olympic medals do not come cheaply. It is difficult to measure precisely the correlation between how much countries spend to train and support their Olympic athletes and how many medals those athletes bring home from the games. As a general rule, however, middle-tier performers at the London games invested a minimum of about $2 million per medal. For Olympic powerhouses like the United States, Australia, and China, the investment per gold medal was probably $6 million, and for some countries, such as Australia, the amount was likely four to five times higher.

If India is to claim twenty medals in the 2020 Olympic Games (with at least seven to eight golds), I believe the implied funding level is at least $120 to $200 million. That’s a big jump up from the $30 million we invested in athletes in London, but it is a sum that should be easily within India’s means.

The best way for India to fund the development of its Olympic athletes is through a public-private partnership model along the lines of
Great Britain’s Olympic support entity, UK Sport. I advocate the establishment of an independently administered Indian Olympic Fund, which could be supported by both the private sector and the Indian government. The fund would be charged with channeling money to short-term programs such as training and competitions, but also for investing in long-term development projects such as building stadiums and training facilities and purchasing equipment. The fund should be governed by an independent committee composed of members drawn from a variety of different backgrounds, including sports, administration, and the business world. Members should serve four- to eight-year terms that rotate in tandem with the Olympic games. An organization of this type would enable funding athletes in a transparent, modern way in keeping with widely established auditing practices.

Great Britain’s experience suggests a promising model for India. Unsatisfied with their nation’s record of just fifteen medals in the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, Great Britain created UK Sport, a national sports fund, and resolved to support the new entity with money from the national lottery. UK Sport took a hardheaded strategic approach to allocating funds, prioritizing sports in which British athletes excelled or had promise, such as rowing, sailing, cycling, and track and field. Within each sport, the fund focused on support for the most promising athletes. This effort to pick winners was not without controversy. But funding levels for individual athletes were determined by professional, transparent methods using clear performance targets for athletes and teams. At the same time, the agency set aside funds to develop promising newcomers, both sports and athletes.

For Britain, this more rigorous approach to Olympic competition has clearly paid off. Since Atlanta, Britain has steadily improved its medal count, winning twenty-eight medals in Sydney in 2000, thirty in Athens in 2004, and forty-seven in Beijing in 2008. At the London games in 2012, Team Britain hauled home a record-shattering sixty-five medals.

For India’s would-be Olympians, the funding landscape could not be more different. Currently all elite Indian athletes other than cricketers must rely on government funding for the chance to train and compete at
an Olympic level. Private groups like Olympic Gold Quest, Mittal Champions Trust, and the Lakshya Sports Foundation have begun to reduce athletes’ dependence on the state, but the quantum of private funding must be increased dramatically—ideally to around 50 percent, up from the current ratio of less than 10 percent. This will free government moneys to be used for the more basic task of developing sports facilities around the country. Despite an expanding budget, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports has not been able to build a sports infrastructure in India at an adequate pace. We need to embark on a systematic building program comparable to India’s effort in 2010, when crews rushed to upgrade training facilities before the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.