*Saksham Agarwal

In this episode, we speak with Shubham Jain, doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge and a researcher in human rights and sports law, about India’s changing sports governance framework. The conversation examines the National Sports Policy and the National Sports Governance Act, exploring whether ambitious goals like Olympic success can align with meaningful governance reform.

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Saksham: Hello to everyone watching! Today, we have with us Mr. Shubham Jain. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, an independent human rights and sports law researcher, and he also works with the Centre for Sports and Human Rights. He has previously worked with the Centre for Sports Law Policy. Today, he will discuss with us and critically examine India’s National Sports Policy alongside the recently passed National Sports Governance Act. While the National Sports Policy sets out an ambitious vision for transforming India, the Governance Act provides a statutory backbone for the same. And today, through this discussion, we will try to find out what the implications of these two acts are.

Now, sir, I will begin with my first question for you. The National Sports Policy sets very ambitious performance targets for India, such as Olympic success and hosting the Olympics in the future. While the Governance Act, on the other hand, emphasises reforms through various bodies. Do you see these frameworks in practice, not just in theory, working in harmony? Or is there a risk of policy goals being undermined by such governance bottlenecks?

Shubham Jain: Hi, Saksham. Thank you so much, first of all, for the kind invitation to speak on this topic, and also to the whole Law School Policy Review team. I think this is a fantastic initiative with the new governance reforms coming up. To answer your question, I think the two documents are fundamentally quite different and with different objectives, but also complementary in some sense.

The sports governance bill is focused primarily on setting up the skeleton for reforming and governing Indian sports through the National Sports Board, the recognition of the different federations, and how their elections are supposed to be run and so on and so forth. It changes the way in which sports governance has worked in India, primarily focused on the institutional actors that govern, regulate, and organise sports, and changing the accountability mechanisms and the way in which the whole structure is set up.

The National Sports Policy is focused specifically on what Indian sports should be about, starting from the grassroots level to the elite sports level and also how sports as a field, as a sector, or an industry interacts with other fields in terms of economics, society, and politics. So, the overall politics, economy, and social nature come into it, and the five pillars, I think, in the National Sports Policy make this quite clear. The focus is on excellence, economic growth, social cohesion, people’s movement, and the academic learning and the physical fitness.

But having said that, they are also complementary in some ways, even though they do not necessarily refer to each other. Obviously, the Sports Governance Act does not make any mention of the Sports Policy. The Policy does a bit in the sense that it talks about the fact that there will be reforms. So, the reforms in governance are coming up. If I were to look at them together, I would say that if you consider sports as a group of people, then the Sports Governance Act provides a skeleton for one of those persons, which is primarily looking at the sports bodies and the institutional actors, which are private organisations.

The Sports Policy tries to provide a mission statement or an action plan for what sports bodies and other institutional actors need to do, which includes the government and private actors. What is missing is the flesh and the social cohesion that will connect different actors and that will fill in these skeletons. A lot of that will be done by the National Sports Board, which is being established under the Sports Governance Act. Recent news suggests that the government should be establishing that within this year.  It should be functioning by December or early January next year. It is all very dependent on what the National Sports Board does. It has a lot of residuary and specific powers under the Act.

But as of now, currently, when we speak about this in October 2025, there are no direct and specific convergences between the two documents. But I expect a lot will come in the next six months or so. Then we will start to get a better picture of how they are connected and whether they will actually be able to work well in tandem with each other.

Saksham:  Yes, sir. I also think, as you said, it is too early to say anything about how they will work. But I think both of them have to obviously work together with each other. Sure, they have some clashes. But at the end of the day, their ultimate goal, I believe, is the same, which is to progress India’s sporting landscape. 

Shubham Jain: But just to add one thing there, which is also that while the National Sports Policy is envisaged as a policy, if you look at the text and the general narrative around it, I would say it is more of an aspirational mission statement, in the sense that there is a lot of good content and a lot of mention of different things that India and the government and different actors should do. But it is a little thin on the specifics of how this will be done, and who will do these things. So a policy can only be really effective when it is accompanied by an action plan, by an implementation mechanism, by specific delineation of responsibilities and accountabilities. That is something currently missing, so even though it is branded as a policy, in my opinion, it is more of an aspirational mission statement at this stage. It will hopefully start taking the shape of an actual policy when we see more of an action plan, and more of a specific delineation of responsibilities and institutional architectures, and who will do what and how that will come together. 

Saksham: Okay, that makes sense, sir. So again, like you said, the National Sports Policy is aspirational; it sets out a lot of goals. One of these goals, as we know, is obviously to make India a global sporting contender, but very specifically, it targets us hosting the 2036 Olympics. Do you think that this policy would risk, or this plan would risk prioritising elite performance at the cost of more grassroots participation and general athlete welfare? Do you think that this goal can be balanced by making sure that we also do not essentially compromise the development of our athletes? 

Shubham Jain: That is the question, right? All the noise that is being made and all the aspirations that are coming about in relation to sports in India in the past six or twelve months, whether they will really only focus on the elite sports or they will build a people’s movement? In that sense, on paper, at least, the Sports Policy seems to take all the right measures, and seems to be in a very good sort of space in terms of the heart and soul of the policy, which focuses on building a people’s movement, connecting it with education, and a holistic development.

But if you look at what has been happening in the elite sports space in India in the past decade or so, there has been a lot of focus on building elite sports. There are many different civil society actors, Go Sports Foundation, for instance, and the Target Olympic Podium scheme, which earlier was private and then became government run. A lot of government and private actors through their CSR funding are helping elite athletes in different Olympic sports. The results have been there. We have done very well in Olympic sports, even if it has not always translated directly into the top three positions.

We are doing incredibly well in the World Championships in different sports. We are doing very well in youth sports, in many youth championships, Youth Olympics, the Youth Asian Games. We are also doing very well in para sports. The question is, how does that translate into more consistent performances? What is it about the Olympics? Why is hosting the Olympics such a big thing? That is a question we must ask. We keep hearing that India wants to host the Olympics, that people want to host the Olympics, but why? What is it about the Olympics? Does hosting the Olympics suddenly make a nation more physically fit or physically active? Not necessarily.

The evidence from many different past Olympic hosts seems to indicate that there is little to no change in the general perception of physical fitness and physical activity in the general population. In fact, evidence from Canada seems to suggest something very stark, which is that general participation levels fall because people see the Olympics up close, and they think that these are just elite performers and they can never get to that stage. So, what is even the point of engaging in physical fitness, which is very stark and very paradoxical, but that is the evidence.

So, there is little evidence that the Olympics itself can translate into a large-scale physical change in terms of the way people participate in sports. Which is why something interesting to look at is how different countries do this differently, specifically at the grassroots. The Norwegian model is very interesting, which is that there is less focus on elite sports and more focus on building a relationship with physical activity, especially physical activity starting from a young age. For a very large part of their lives, children or athletes in Norway are not given any specific positions until the age of 13, or 14, or 15. They are not allowed to specialise in any particular sport. They have to engage in all sports. They are not given specific positions, like coming first or second, for instance. So, the focus is on participation and on doing the best you can. The focus is on developing multiple skills in different sports. You can only specialise after you reach an age where you can genuinely decide for yourself that this is what you want in your life. So in that sense, elite athletes and peak performance athleticism become a byproduct of the grassroots.

So if you think of an example of healthcare, where we say that prevention is better than cure. It is similar in that sense if you think about sports.  We will just make sure that people are participating in sports at a very grand scale and developing multiple skills from a young age. And then elite sports and performance sports become a byproduct of that. Because if you have that critical mass participating at a young age,  obviously, some of them will turn out to be great athletes in particular. So that is something that needs to be the focus. At present, it seems that there is some talk about this. But again, as I said, we will really get to know whether this can happen and will happen when we see more specifics, and we see the evidence of actual implementation and different dynamics and cogs in the system working together.

But if we can bring some of those learnings from those models that I just mentioned, for instance, then we can ensure a critical mass at the grassroots stage, which can then automatically translate into elite performance. 

Saksham: That makes sense. So again, talking about hosting the Olympics. I think one thing you work on a lot is climate justice in sport. To host the Olympics or any major event, essentially, even when we were looking to host the Commonwealth Games, I think Ahmedabad was the host, which is also obviously where we want to host the Olympics. So, we need a lot of mega infrastructure for this, right? And this would probably be done through the NSP, and again, the NSGA, the National Sports Board that you were talking about earlier, that will essentially play a huge role in this, because the NSGA centralises a lot of control in them.

So, would working towards mega infrastructure to host such a huge event essentially sideline sustainability in favour of such mega event politics? These are also concerns that other countries, which have recently hosted the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup, have had. 

Shubham Jain: Yes, of course. Infrastructure is needed. We really need great sporting infrastructure to be able to make sure that we can have sporting participation on a mass scale. The question is how much infrastructure is needed, where it is needed and in what manner it will come about. So let me expand on that.

How much infrastructure is needed? How many cricket stadiums do we really need? Do we really need a cricket stadium in every city, or can we have more multipurpose stadiums, for instance, which can host multiple different sports, or sports enclaves where you can have multiple sports being played in parts of the same setup? Or we spread out different sporting infrastructure across the city, so that people don’t have to travel long distances to be able to participate. 

Do we really need stadiums everywhere which involve mass construction and use of concrete, which is very carbon-intensive? Can we have smaller fields where people can participate at the local level, and they do not have to travel many miles to participate through heat or pollution? Do we need stadiums that are only available to elite athletes, or can we have structures where sporting fields are available for people at the local level?

Again, if I go back to Norway, and I keep going back there because I was there last year and I saw this firsthand, it was quite an eye-opener. I was walking through the city, and you could see that great quality sporting infrastructure was available in every locality, with a running track with a central field and a little space for people to sit and watch. These are available in every community, which is within walking distance for most people, and this is true for many other countries. So, how can we make sure that we have these small pushes for multi-sport fields, which are not very carbon-intensive, comply with sustainability goals in the sense that they increase the greenery, and are available to people locally? This again connects with the mass participation idea.

And then we only need big stadiums in certain locations. So that is the question of how much, right? And then the question of where. Do we need everything to be concentrated in one city or state? Yes, there is a lot of push about Ahmedabad hosting the events, but do we need everything in one place? Recently, we have seen different sporting events where this was happening with the existing facilities. In the Paris Olympics as well, while it was the Paris Olympics, many Olympic events did not happen in Paris. They happened all across the country of France, or some even many miles away from France, which was different and controversial, especially with surfing. But football was happening all across the country, for instance, and different sports where the venues already existed in other parts of the country. They were happening there.

So, the question is, do we need to build everything new, or can we have great hockey matches in other parts of India, for instance, Orissa or Bihar, where great infrastructure for hockey already exists, or shooting in other parts of the country where great shooting ranges already exist? While Ahmedabad can be the poster boy, so as to say, do we really need innovative infrastructure right there concentrated in one city? That is something to consider. So that is the how much and where element.

And then there is also the manner in which infrastructure push comes, which is connected to considerations of equity. How do we push out people who already exist and have lived on a certain part of land when we try to build these things? Are local considerations and the voice of the people taken into account when these things are done? What they really want, whether people in that locality and environment want a hockey stadium, whether they want a football stadium, whether they just want a playing field or whether they want something else.

Specifically connecting to the climate part, there is also a lot of focus now on these big stadiums, especially covered stadiums, serving as venues that can serve as refuge points in case of mega disasters like cyclones, floods, or monsoons. To build those things within the stadiums so that they can serve as venues for community resilience in case needed. So those things can come into sustainable construction techniques. Usage of less concrete, for instance, recycling of construction material, or sourcing locally so that there is less carbon emission. Those things need to come in. So while an infrastructure push needs to happen, and India definitely needs a lot more infrastructure, we need to ask how much, what, where and in what manner. Specifically build in considerations of sustainability, equity, and climate justice in this course. That is how we will be able to demonstrate that we truly care about holding a sustainable Olympics and Paralympics as well. This is one thing that is consistently missed. I find this quite remarkable that we keep talking about the Olympics, but we never mention the fact that the Paralympics happen simultaneously, and if we are bidding for the 2036 Olympics, it is also a complete bid. So that always needs to be said together. But yeah, that is a sidebar.

Saksham: Yeah, definitely, sir. I also had one more question. As you mentioned, multi-purpose stadiums, I think that was the term used. So, we see in a lot of stadiums, for example when I watch the Olympics, the track race is going on at the same time as we are having javelin events. Is that what you are talking about? Or are you talking about more of, for lack of a better term, a sporting village, like where multiple sports are being played alongside? 

Shubham Jain: I think it is both. Sometimes they’re not necessarily different; it depends on the context and what we really want. So, for instance, the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi, which hosted the last Commonwealth Games in 2010, is a multi-sport venue in the sense that you can have athletics going on in the centre, you have the track and field event side, and you can also convert the central field into a football stadium. That is the kind of multi-purpose stadium that I am talking about. In some ways, if it is built smartly enough, that could also be converted into a football field, because we do not really need more cricket stadiums in the country. I think we have more than enough. So that is one way to do that. But if you go there, you will see that Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium complex also has other sports, which are hosted within the facility. You can easily have table tennis tables easily integrated in one location in the venue. You can have squash courts integrated into that. So, those things can be easily integrated into smaller sports, which need less infrastructure.

Obviously, there are other facilities elsewhere in the country, where you have two or three hockey pitches right next to each other. So, not really stadiums, but just pitches, right? You have two or three football pitches right next to each other. You have a few tennis courts where people can come and participate. There are those sporting village concepts also. But the question is, how many of them do we need? Where do we need them? Do we need to concentrate them in a particular city or state? Or do we need to spread them out equally? Because if we need participation at the mass level, you cannot just have elite sports facilities concentrated in specific portions. This needs to be thought about holistically, how this will be built at the district, state, and national level, so that anybody who wants to participate, starting from the grassroots to the elite level, they know that they do not have to travel insane amounts of distances to be able to participate. Everything should be available in a local context for everybody, for most of the sports which are popular and needed in that local context.

Saksham: Yes, I think this single city model is something that we have mostly derived from the Olympics itself. Like other sports, for example, the FIFA World Cup has a host country, and then you have matches all around the country. Now you have multiple countries hosting it. It did not really happen because of COVID-19, but the 2020 UEFA European Championship was planned to be hosted around Europe, in different cities in Europe. They obviously had to tone it down because of COVID, it was not very feasible and also not very safe. But yes, as you said, the best hockey stadiums, not just in India, but I would also say in the world, probably are in Odisha. Like, it is absolutely world-class infrastructure. I have been to them, so I have actually seen it myself.

So again, it would not make sense for us to just make the same level of hockey stadiums again in just Ahmedabad or in Delhi or wherever we host the game. We can very well have those games happening in Odisha, while just having Ahmedabad be the host city, for, as you mentioned, just purposes of showing it. So, most games can happen in Ahmedabad. But again, whatever we do not have to build again, we do not need to build again. It can definitely be done in other places. 

Shubham Jain: There are additional benefits to it as well, right? Because if we spread that out in the sense of some events happening somewhere else, where the great infrastructure already exists, we also democratise access in different ways. So, for instance, fans who are living in Odisha might not necessarily travel out to Ahmedabad to watch the Olympic Games, but if the Olympic hockey events were happening there, they are more likely to attend them. So, then you increase the participation of the population in terms of supporting the events, engaging with the event, and volunteering. Many of these mega events come with a lot of volunteering opportunities for local populations. People travel from across the world to volunteer as well. You are more likely to volunteer for a different picture and a different context of the event, and a different association with the event.

A lot of athletes feel a different sense of pride if they are playing in their home state or home city, for instance. So, you can increase that too. You also reduce the burden on a single city in terms of influx of tourists, spectators, and other officials. There is a need to build new hotel infrastructure and so much more infrastructure that comes with hosting an Olympic Games, not just the stadiums, right? You need roads, you need transportation links, you need hotels, you need offices. If those things are also again spread out, then the pressure on a single city is reduced, which again is in very well consonance with sustainability. So, you have to plan so that fans are not just travelling from one city to another and burning carbon emissions to their air travel. This has to be considered and built.

It also means that there is less pressure on the people in that host city to compete for local services. If so much is happening in one city, there is pressure on electricity, waste management, and water, all these things are very significant. They significantly impact the local population, who sometimes do not even have enough access to the event, but they have to face the burden of these things. So it works for everyone if we spread out and democratise the event and build in those equity and sustainability considerations.

Saksham: Yes, so obviously, there are general concerns about the USA and the LA Olympics, but one very specific concern that I remember reading about is just the traffic in LA, it is already such a huge problem. When they have the Olympics, they are already making arrangements from now, in 2025, because they are already worried about what is going to happen. Then again, sure, maybe not Ahmedabad, but what if we do have the Olympics in Mumbai? It would be a huge issue. So definitely, I agree with you. Again, so one thing you mentioned was democratising access to sport. So another feature of the NSP was essentially to integrate it with the National Education Policy and to embed sports in the curricula.

So, in practice, how far do you feel this might go in integrating and democratising access to people all around India to sport? Because right now, we see not all sports, but a lot of sports are very limited to people who can access them, people who come from privileged backgrounds in the first place. 

Shubham Jain: Yes, absolutely. And I think it is a great push to integrate it with the national education policy, and very much needed. It is something that we have spoken about previously. We produced a report on physical literacy a few years ago, submitted it to the government and various other stakeholders, which talked about integrating physical activity and sports, starting right from education. So that is a great step, but how far it will go in democratising access depends a lot on the education system in the school itself. How far is our education system democratised and equitable? We know that it is not to a large extent. My school, for instance, where I studied many years ago, had a very small field where everything was happening.

There was a volleyball court inside that field. There was a skating rink outside it where sometimes people were just standing, so there was no space to skate. For instance, races would happen on that same skating rink. There was not enough space on that field to play football because there were volleyball courts right in the middle of it. There was a small basketball court right next to it. So, most educational institutions in India are constrained by spaces. Yes, it is great to integrate, but then it will all depend on what that school can do, what that educational institution can do within the resources and the space it has. The democratisation of sports through education will go only as far as we can democratise education itself, which takes us back to how the National Education Policy is working.

Then obviously you need to integrate this with other things. As I said, space is a big constraint. So, this needs to be aligned with city planning, urban planning, and town and village planning, so that there are more spaces. So, for instance, can schools that are located close by share their sporting infrastructure with each other? Can another field that is located next to a school, for instance, become part of the education and the local community? If more funding goes to a school, for instance, to develop its sporting infrastructure, can that infrastructure then be used in the evenings after school for participation of the local community? So how can you use that infrastructure, which is created for one purpose, for many different purposes, and how can you use it throughout the day? Because if something great is inside a school, and if it is only being used for half the day, then it is lying waste for the other half of the day, right? Can you then maybe even create a small charge for local people to use it, in case that is not built through public money? But if it is built with public money, it should be freely accessible. So, I think this needs to come together, the sports, the local planning, and the education planning, and the considerations of the public, because we need to start seeing sport as a public good, as a common in some ways. Democratisation can only happen to the extent we can democratise education, which is just a long-term aim, but a long way from really happening. So, it should work with the whole system. 

Saksham: Definitely. So that is one of the things you suggested, essentially utilising fields beyond the hours we can access. So, our university did something like this recently. The university entered into a partnership with Bengaluru FC, and they made a state-of-the-art football turf. The thing is, we only used it for a few hours after classes. But now they have turned it into a way that they have their junior teams practising there. Sometimes they have the senior teams come and play matches. As you said, anyone who wants to come and play can come and utilise that field.

So, that is one of the ideas that you have talked about. And then again, space. Again, I agree with you. So, I remember in my school, we used to have this huge issue because we had football, cricket, and hockey on the same field. It was a huge field. But again, you cannot have all three sports at the same time. We were playing football at one end, we were playing hockey at one end, so the people in cricket cannot play because they don’t have enough space to field.

If they were playing, then we could not play. I remember it was such a huge problem. My school had to install nets between them and had to demarcate three different areas, and then everyone essentially lost out on that. So, that definitely is an issue. I think that is something that has to be worked on beyond both the sports policy and the education policy. I think that is something which is probably going to take more time to happen, especially at such a level. Because again, as you said, it does seem that our policies right now are prioritising performance and more efficiency at the elite level and not at the grassroots level. That is something that will definitely take more time. 

Also, you talked about the different pillars of the NSP. So one of them is essentially using sports as an engine for economic development through tourism, manufacturing, and entrepreneurship. The NSP also outlines a very strong role for private sector partnerships. So, would this economic framing essentially risk commodifying sports? I think it would lead to some sort of over-reliance on the private sector. So do you feel this can undermine either athlete participation or general community participation? Or, more importantly, even just widen the inequalities between people’s access to sport? 

Shubham Jain: That is a significant issue that needs to be discussed. So, to begin with, I think it is inescapable that sport is a commodity already and has been for many decades. I think one historical context that can be referred to in the previous times is the Olympics that happened in LA in 1984, which is when the whole broadcasting and sponsorship model came about, which has since become the go-to framework for the organisation of events. The fact that you can have event-related sponsors and specific sponsors was pioneered by the 1984 LA Games. Like everything, American commodification is everywhere. So, I think it is inescapable that sport is a commodity in many different ways, especially at the elite and professional levels.

So, that is something that we cannot go back on, and perhaps we do not even need to in the sense that sports has acquired the kind of prominence it has over the last five decades or so because there is so much money in sports. There is so much broadcasting and sponsorship, and everything else.

But the question is, how can we make sure that the interaction of business with sports is not leading to harm, is not leading to outcomes that are suboptimal for the people that are the core stakeholders in sports? I also do not think an over-reliance on private actors is necessarily an issue, because it is not as if the state or the public institutions do everything right. It is not as if it is governed or regulated or delivered by public actors or state entities, that there are no issues about safety or discrimination or anything else. Issues around abuse, harassment, human rights, they can exist in the private sphere and the public sphere. The question is about accountability and responsibility. Both spheres can be equally bad or equally good.

To make them good, what we need are transparent structures that make sure that everybody knows what is happening. We need accountability; we need a remedy in case of the harm that is happening. So, my issue is not with the involvement of the private sector. I think that is very much needed, especially in a country like India, where the state can only do so much with the competing demands that the state has. The private sector has done incredibly well in the past decade, also, especially in propping up elite sports and how that has, in some ways or others, percolated down the system. The focus has been top-down, but that needs to become bottom-up as we go forward, as we discussed earlier.

The private sector has a huge role to play in different ways, supporting through equipment, supporting through the creation of infrastructure, and supporting through support for promising athletes. And the private and the public, and the market, need to work together. So, that is not an issue. The question is how we can ensure that there is responsibility, accountability and transparency attached to these structures, whether they are quasi-public, public-private, purely public or just private. For that, I think it will be essential that once the National Sports Board starts working on what it needs to, it needs to frame those policies around transparent governance, equity, considerations of human rights, and around sustainability, climate, and everything else that we have discussed. So, those need to apply equally to the private actors, to the public actors, and to the partnerships between them. That, if worked in a perfect way, can take care of issues around human rights and other inequalities. 

Saksham: So again, as you mentioned, the question of human rights pops up a lot in sports. And again, you worked extensively on human rights in sports. You recently also wrote on the right to access sport as a human right, as a fundamental right itself. So, the NSP and the NSGA specifically, explicitly focus a lot on inclusivity in sports. The NSGA itself proposes a Safe Sport Policy. But one of the criticisms of it has been that it explicitly does not address the access or the rights of queer and transgender athletes. So, from drawing on your experience and your work, do you think this omission is significant? Would it essentially hurt them? Is there a need for a complementary safe sports policy to essentially remedy this issue? 

Shubham Jain: Yes, I think inclusivity is a fundamental issue that has been persistent for a very long time, not just in Indian sports, but in sports globally. So, there are two things here that I would like to say. One is that my focus in thinking about sports governance is around issues of equity, equality, climate justice, sustainability, safe sport, and so on and so forth. Human rights, of course, is the larger umbrella that captures these aspects. You would see that the National Sports Governance Act only includes explicitly safe sport out of all of these considerations, which is great. My view is that the explicit inclusion of safe sport in the National Sports Governance Act is in response to concerns around the Wrestling Federation of India that have been raised in the past couple of years, becoming an international issue with international civil society organisations talking about it. The National Human Rights Commission of India even organised a symposium or a one day event around that. So, that has been front and centre, which is why I think there is a focus on safe sport, though that is very narrow in my opinion because that only specifically talks about women and children.

To me, safe sport is much, much broader than that. It is not just about women and children, it is very much so about women and children, because they are more at risk, but safe sport is for everyone. Safe sport is not just about freedom from harassment or abuse or sexual abuse. It is much more than that. It is whether the sporting ecosystem is safe in a larger way, or are the training grounds giving you a safe space to play? Are the sporting structures safe enough that you are not harassed by anyone who is in a position of power? Are they safe in the sense that you are not being made to play in deadly heat conditions, for instance, or with considerations of climate? So safe sport is much broader. It applies to everyone. Yes, you have specific provisions for more at-risk populations, disabled people, women, children, and so on. Safe sport has a connection with inclusivity in the sense that people need to feel included. But I do not think the Safe Sport Policy is the way to include transgender athletes.

Those are different issues, for instance. Yes, you need specific safe sport provisions for transgender athletes, but the inclusion of the athletes themselves is a different matter. It is about how you build structures that include transgender athletes. Inclusivity broadly is also much broader than that in the sense of whether women are participating in the governance structures and in sports in the same way as men, for instance. Whether disabled people are able to participate in the same way as able-bodied athletes.

Considerations around caste, religion, and all of these different intersecting identities that we are born with or we ascribe to have an impact on our ability to access different parts of society, which includes sports as well. We see a lot of inequity in access to various public things like education, public employment based on these backgrounds, and sport is no different from others. So, the notion that sports provide a level playing field is something that is not necessarily true, even though we might widely believe differently. So, inclusivity is also broader. And then specifically thinking about transgender athletes and queer athletes is important because they have faced a lot of repression, a lot of difficulties, a lot of disadvantages in multiple different ways, specifically transgender athletes in the sports context.

So, that needs to be talked about in the larger Indian constitutional law structures. Because we have judgments like NALSA, that have specifically spoken about queerness and the rights of people who do not necessarily ascribe to the gender binary of male and female. We have obligations arising from our constitutional law structures. So, the inclusion of transgender athletes should be considered from that perspective. It is also consistently being debated on the global stage. So that needs a separate discussion, just tied to Safe Sport Policy, but it specifically needs to focus on inclusion, special needs, and the right constitutions. 

That again is a bit of a miss in my opinion, in both the Governance Act and the Policy. It would have been very, very ideal and useful if those were included specifically in the mandates of the National Sports Board. The policy could have spoken more about that. But as I said, let’s see what happens in the next six to twelve months and what the National Sports Board does about these things and other things.

Saksham: Okay, so based on our conversation today and of course, the discourse around Indian sports in general, the last few months have been very transformative for Indian sports, of course, with the Governance Act, with the Online Gaming Regulation Act. I was talking to, I do not remember exactly who, but someone who works in the industry. They say sometimes decades go by and nothing happens, and sometimes in a day, a decade passes. That is how they compared what happened to sports law in India in the last couple of months. So, just looking ahead, how do you essentially envision the next decade of Indian sports law, the next decade till the next Olympics, which is like eleven years from now? So again, should future reforms move more towards a rights-based approach, or do we also at the same time need to double down on governance and performance? Essentially, what would be your ideal roadmap to bridge, as you put it, the NSP’s aspirational framework with the NSG’s legal framework to build the best possible road for Indian sports? 

Shubham Jain: Yeah, thanks for that question, Saksham. That quote about decades happening is often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, I think. Though there are some conflicting accounts from Reddit, I  am not able to ascertain if he actually said that. But yeah, that is used quite often in these contexts. I have heard it many times. So, coming back to the question of whether the reforms should focus on a rights-based approach or on governance and performance. I think it does not have to be a choice, and it should not be a choice. Both can and should go together. Ideally, that is how we should work. That should be beyond even question, to be honest. We need to focus on, as I said, a bottom-up approach where we focus on mass participation, focus on making sure the ability to access sports and sporting opportunities is available, and is of the best quality, to the largest mass of population, especially contextually adapted for the needs of specific people who face specific kinds of disadvantages. This is a rights-based approach, but it is also a governance and performance approach, as it examines how these can effectively translate into elite athletes in the future. This has to be done through a good governance framework.

The other thing that I would mention, which can help us in the realisation of this vision, is a multi-stakeholder approach. One thing which has been talked about a lot in the national sports more is, in fact, the focus on athletes and making athletes a part of governance, which is absolutely great. But I feel that is a bit of a decade or so behind what the global debates on these issues have been. We have now moved on to elite-focused governance, but the rest of the globe is moving to even beyond athletes, which is that it is not just athletes who are core actors in sports, but also other stakeholders.

So, for instance, the fans, the volunteers, the workers, the support staff, local communities where the events are happening, et cetera. So, it has to be a multi-stakeholder approach. Athletes have to be a part of that governance, but also these other stakeholders, right? Because sport is for everyone, and even if I’m not participating as an athlete, I could be participating as a fan, I could be participating as a volunteer, or I could have my children in sport, so parents become great stakeholders and important ones.

So, it has to be a multi-stakeholder approach, one which can account for the views and the needs of the different stakeholders. The approach needs to be research-based in the sense that we need to understand the problem by talking to the people who face these problems. We cannot just have policies being promulgated at the top without actually understanding what the problems are. A lot of governments in different countries and different sports bodies across the globe have specific programmes and funding opportunities for researchers to work on specific programmes and projects to find the problems and then find solutions and co-create solutions with the people who face the problems. Then those problems are tackled in that specific way. So, for instance, recently, the UK Government commissioned a study to understand the impact of climate change on UK sport. That study found that UK sport will lose millions. It is sort of an economics study, right? UK sport will lose millions of pounds with the way the current projections of climate change are, and if the sport does not adapt. So these kinds of studies, both policy and research, are needed to understand the problem and co-create solutions.

Then a genuine governance transformation can only happen when we include all the stakeholders, as I pointed out. We need to have diversity of people as well, not just lip service to having some people, some athletes or some women included, but really genuine diversity of different ways, like disabled people, people from different castes, tribal backgrounds, religions, and experts who have been working in the field for many years. I particularly think fans are very important, often left behind in Indian governance discussions. Fans are one of the most important components. They are the people who drive the sport by funding the sport in some ways. 

Other things that are on my wishlist would be recognition of athletes as workers, because effectively, at the elite professional level, athletes are workers, right? Sport is their workplace, which comes with recognition of union rights, which needs to happen for the collective value and for their voice to come. Then equality in terms of gender pay, which is something where sport lags behind significantly compared to a lot of other fields. There are often concerns around how male sports attract more money, so male athletes should get more pay. But think about what the purpose of sport is. The purpose of sport is not a business where I am bringing X amount of money as an athlete, and as a star athlete, I get that X amount of money. The purpose of sport and the purpose of sports bodies is to ensure the growth and development of sport. So a little distribution has to happen there. So equal pay is very important. There is no argument against it if we think of sport as a public common and as a goal, and think of athletes as workers, deserving of equal pay. 

I’ve spoken about climate justice, which needs to happen along multiple axes, which is in the building of infrastructure, in the thinking of how climate change is impacting people, which people are more at risk, are disadvantaged already, and have less adaptive capability. So, how can these reforms that we have planned for the next 10 years or so at least, how can they already include those considerations of climate justice and equity? And in the end, I think a lot of these things are already happening globally. So we do not need to start from scratch, right? We can build on existing frameworks, existing policies globally and see how they can be improved. We can build policies together. So if we are thinking of governments and sports in this multi-stakeholder sort of inclusive approach, then I think we can do very well with Indian sports and see the sporting system and the country blossom in a very wonderful way.

Saksham: All right. Thank you for that, sir. Thank you for taking the time to discuss this with us today. Thank you to our viewers for tuning in. We hope you found this conversation as enriching and exciting as we did. Thank you again for taking out time for this today, sir.

Shubham Jain: Thanks a lot, Saksham. Great to speak to you!