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India has long demonstrated a remarkable ability to produce world-class talent through the rigour of its academic system. The continuous cycle of evaluation — unit tests, semester examinations, board exams, competitive entrance tests, vivas, and practicals — subjects students to intense, repeated scrutiny over many years. Those who emerge from this process are often exceptionally well-prepared to compete on the global stage, as evidenced by the significant number of Indians who lead some of the world’s largest and most influential corporations.
The question that demands serious consideration is: why has this philosophy never been applied to sport?
Having spent over a decade embedded in India’s sports ecosystem — from grassroots development to elite high-performance environments — including seven years as Head of Sport Science and Rehabilitation at Olympic Gold Quest and two Olympic campaigns in London and Rio, the gaps in our sporting infrastructure are difficult to overlook. Working alongside athletes of the calibre of Mary Kom, Gagan Narang, and Saina Nehwal offers a privileged vantage point from which to observe both the extraordinary potential of Indian athletes and the systemic limitations that constrain it.
The most consequential of these limitations is the absence of a structured, ongoing assessment culture in Indian sport.
In academia, a student’s progress is measured continuously, at multiple levels, and against clearly defined benchmarks. In sport, a young athlete may go months — sometimes years — without any formal evaluation of their physical capacities or technical development. The occasional competition is no substitute for a rigorous, longitudinal assessment framework.
A structured programme in which athletes as young as twelve are regularly evaluated across key physical parameters — stamina, speed, agility, balance, power, and flexibility — alongside sport-specific technical assessments would fundamentally change the landscape. Tracked consistently over years, such data would equip coaches, parents, and sporting bodies to identify high-potential talent at an early stage, design targeted training interventions, ensure that developing athletes are appropriately challenged, and build a credible, sustainable pipeline toward world-class performance.
At present, India produces champions largely in spite of its system, not because of it. Medals are a testament to individual brilliance and personal determination rather than institutional process or deliberate development pathways. This is both the most significant inefficiency in Indian sport and its most compelling opportunity for reform.
A national athlete assessment framework — drawing on the same culture of rigorous, continuous evaluation that has made India a global powerhouse in business and technology — has the potential to transform Indian sport from a system that discovers talent by chance into one that develops it by design.
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