Countries with a population of just 8 to 9 crore like Germany, France atleast get 40 to 45 medals on an average, including atleast 10 gold medals in Olympics. It is rather tragic sir, that India with a population of 132 crores almost 14 times then above two gets hardly 15 medals and in total and a poor 1 or 2 Gold medals. Now, one may argue that the above two countries are “developed” countries whereas we are still considered a “developing country”. My counter-argument is that if India can show its mettle in the area of software development, engineering and medical science why not in sports? So what if we are a developing country. We lag behind others in terms of medals, because of following reasons:-
(1) Most of indians do not even know the names of so many sport events which bear Gold medals if a player performs at his best, for example Taekwondo, Kata, Kumite etc. These events have Gold medals each. The sports ministry of India should see to it that we have players/athletes participating in each and every event of the Olympics and not just a few of them which we do every time. After all, if we do not participate in more how can we win more medals? We must start educating the youth about all the games which are played in the Olympics, analyse which among them are interested in a new type of sport and start giving him/her adequate training and facility so that he becomes capable enough to win a medal for India at an international event of repute.
(2) In spite of repeated allocations in the Union Budget of India every year, we fall short in terms of adequate infrastructural facilities like stadiums, large number of sports equipments made available either free or at very negligible costs to the youth who are interested in playing them, etc. Look at China, it is always among the top 3 in the medals tally during each and every Olympics in the last about 30 years now. Why? It has a special ministry which looks into the minutest of minute details as to what the future players of each and every sport will require. We need to gear up a lot in that aspect.
(3) Try and educate people to get rid of the lazy mentality which we indians have. May be it is because we happen to be an equatorial country geographically and such countries are believed to have citizens with inherent lazy mentality towards sports. But that should not become the reason for our reluctance to participate in sports events on a regular basis.
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