London Olympics - India

As the London Olympics comes to an end, i was thinking about how India produced results. Quiet frankly, its disappointing and shameful to find out that a populations of over 1billion and we could not produce proper athletes to earn even one gold meal? I know, sitting here writing about it might not help, as some would say, if you want to pass the blame, why don't you do something about it? Why don't you join the teams competing. Well that's understandable, but just my view is we should have managed to win atleast one gold?

Congratulations to the Indian athletes that did perform and for wining us the silver and bronze medals. Shooting, boxing, badminton and wrestling are the sports where India has won medals. What i am comparing here is the sheer size of the population.

India's close rival China - 38 gold, 27 silver and 22 bronze. Countries with smaller population like Germany, Italy, France, Greece, Japan etc, have all done much better at collecting medals than a densely populated country like India. Indians are crazy about one sport - Cricket, and that's where everything else stops. I don't  say that it's a wrong thing but seriously speaking - our national game is Hockey and i don't see anyone stopping their daily lives just to watch Hockey. Neither do we fare well in the game. Why is that?

India is placed number 56 in the Olympics this year. Not that we've done extraordinarily well in any year, but hey who's to blame? India does have its own set of achievements but for a young nation not enough.

In a country of one billion people, it would be highly improbable that we cannot find sportsmen of the same or better caliber / potential than existing in the games. Hence I feel it is more to do with lack of infrastructure than genetic reasons. Also sports (and for that matter art, music as well) as a career is almost never encouraged and is unacceptable to Indian parents - there is an obsession with science / engineering / management i.e the more academic careers. I think both these factors reinforce each other leading to the scenario that we have now.  

India, after attaining freedom from the British rule, has been stricken with so many developmental problems that putting money  into the sports scene of the country has never been deemed to be as important. With the relatively better economy that we have had recently, I would then attribute the reasons to the obsession with Cricket.

Additionally there are factors such as corruption, bureaucracy that I cannot get into because I don't consider myself knowledgeable in that domain. I guess more factual stuff needs to be added to this answer but this is my overall understanding of the Indian sports scenario. Improvement of infrastructure at the grass-root level is essential to the improvement of sports in India.