Safe Sport as Strategic Infrastructure
Why Athlete Safeguarding Is the Load-Bearing Pillar of India's Sporting Ambition
Executive Summary India has set itself the goal of becoming a top-tier sporting nation—bidding to host the 2036 Olympic and Paralympic Games and building, through Khelo India and allied schemes, a talent pipeline that reaches children as young as nine. That ambition rests on a strategic bet: that a wide base of young athletes, competing fairly and fearlessly, will compound into world-class performance year after year. This brief argues that the bet cannot pay off unless one foundational condition is met—that young athletes and their parents feel safe. Safeguarding is not something that gets bolted onto the system; it is the enabling infrastructure the system itself. Recent, recurring abuse cases and the inconsistent institutional response to them reveal a gap between India's sporting aspiration and its protective architecture. Closing this gap is not just important but necessary for India’s sporting ambitions to turn into reality. |
The Ambition Is Systemic, Not Transactional
India's sporting strategy has shifted from being transactional, where the focus was on a handful of proven names, targeting a medal count for the next Olympic cycle, and reliance on individual grit, to sustained excellence that does not just produce occasional podium finishes but consistent, predictable outcomes. This is being done through a deliberately designed sporting strategy that identifies talent early, develops it through structured competition, and produces world-class athletes generation after generation, drawing sponsors and revenue in its wake.
The design of this strategy is already visible. The Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports received a record allocation for 2026–27, and the Khelo India program now anchors a national ecosystem of over a thousand grassroots centers, dozens of state centers of excellence, and hundreds of accredited academies. Its flagship youth games have collectively drawn more than 50,000 athletes across their editions, and the KIRTI (Khelo India Rising Talent Identification) talent-identification initiative, launched in March 2024, actively scouts children aged 9 to 18 through a national network of assessment centres. The logic is to convert a vast young population into a structured pipeline from playground to podium.
The strategy depends on a simple causal chain. As a wide base of young talent competes fairly and fearlessly, they breed competence; competence compounds into consistency; consistency produces the world-beating results that attract money and sustain the system. Every link matters, but competing fairly and fearlessly is the foundational pillar on which this strategy rests. Fearlessness is not a personality trait. It is a condition of the environment and perhaps the most under-examined dependency.
The Load-Bearing Pillar: Safety
A pipeline that reaches children early reaches them at their most impressionable and most vulnerable. Young athletes spend their formative years under adults—coaches, physios, selectors, administrators—who hold decisive power over their careers: who is selected, who travels, who is dropped, whose complaint is heard. That authority, exercised well, not only develops talent but gives confidence and hope to millions of others. Exercised badly, or abusively, it does not merely harm individuals, it breaks the causal chain the entire strategy rests on.
An athlete who fears a coach does not compete fearlessly rather she competes defensively, conceals injury, suppresses dissent, and, too often, leaves the sport altogether. Fear does not breed excellence it breeds compliance and in worst case attrition, not only of the active athlete but countless others who quit even before starting. Fearlessness is what the strategy needs; safety is what can guarantee it. A system that cannot guarantee safety cannot deliver fearlessness, and a system that cannot deliver fearlessness cannot deliver the excellence it was designed to produce.
There is a second, prior dependency, which is also critically linked to the safety guarantee - the pipeline must fill. Parents are the gatekeepers of young talent, and they entrust their children to the system only if they believe it is safe. Every credible report of abuse that goes unaddressed and every transgression incident that circulates in private conversations, but never even gets reported, is not just an individual tragedy; it signals to thousands of watching families that the system cannot be trusted with their child. In a society where sport is still, for many, an optional bet against safer academic paths, that signal is decisive. Safeguarding, in other words, governs both the quality of what the pipeline produces and the volume of what enters it.
A Reality Check: The Gap Between Ambition and Protection
The case for safeguarding would be academic if the risk were hypothetical; unfortunately, they are not. A pattern of abuse—and of institutional failure to respond—has been documented across multiple sports, repeatedly, and recently.
Recurring cases, across sports
The 2023 protest by India's most decorated wrestlers, who publicly accused the Wrestling Federation of India's president and coaches of sexually harassing athletes, was not an isolated scandal but the most visible instance of a systemic problem. Even though the president of the federation was forced to step down from his position, the one that got installed in his place is known to be a close aide and loyalist of the outgoing president.
In January 2026, a national shooting coach was booked and suspended after a minor athlete alleged sexual harassment, with the state women's commission taking cognisance. In 2025, a national-level minor boxer alleged physical and mental harassment by a coach who—despite an FIR—reportedly continued in a leading role at a national camp after internal inquiries found no evidence. Athletics and gymnastics have seen comparable complaints, several involving multiple complainants and allegations that abuse continued for years before it surfaced.
It is possible that these complaints may sometimes be inaccurate, where an athlete out of spite may file a complaint. Unfortunately, if the system that probes it is not impartial or consistent, the public will most often side with the athlete.
The numbers behind the headlines
|
How the cases are handled—and why that is the deeper problem
Federations frequently investigate the complaints against their officials themselves. This is a conflict of interest that undermines both fairness and the perception of it. When the accused holds political or administrative power, inquiries stall, statements pre-empt findings, and complainants that are often young and from modest backgrounds are left exposed.
At the legal level, cases proceed through the ordinary criminal system and, where applicable, the POCSO Act and workplace-harassment law, but slowly, publicly, and with little sport-specific protection for the athlete during the months or years an investigation takes. There is, as yet, no independent national safe-sport body that anchors athlete protection in the best practices of other peer nations. There is no single institution empowered to receive complaints outside federation control, impose interim measures, maintain a public register of banned individuals, and audit compliance. The National Sports Governance Act, 2025 mandates that a Safe Sports Policy be framed, which must address these aspects.
What it costs—athletes, sport, and the public
The damage runs on three levels. For the athlete, abuse carries documented physical and psychological consequences like anxiety, depression, self-harm, post-traumatic stress, and withdrawal from the sport, which cuts careers short precisely when investment in them is highest. For the sport, every unaddressed case erodes trust in selection and governance, drives talented athletes out, and deters the sponsors and partners whose confidence the commercial model depends on. For the public, the steady noise of reported abuses and unreported conversations shapes a perception that entrusting a child to competitive sport is unsafe. That perception is one of the most effective impediments to building a steady athlete pipeline the national strategy is trying.
What the World Already Does—and What India Can Learn
India need not invent a safeguarding system from first principles. The International Olympic Committee has, since 2004, treated safe sport as core to the Movement, and its framework—minimum policy requirements, trained safeguarding officers, and reporting channels independent of the ordinary chain of command—is the standard against which host nations and federations are measured. Because India is bidding to host the 2036 Games, these are precisely the benchmarks by which its sporting institutions will be judged. Several nations have already built the institutions to meet them.
Model | What it is | Defining features |
IOC (global standard) | The reference framework all National Olympic Committees and federations are expected to adopt. | Minimum requirements for safeguarding policy; designated safeguarding officers; games-time reporting framework; “Bronze–Silver–Gold” maturity benchmarking. |
USA — Center for SafeSport | An independent, non-profit body for Olympic & Paralympic sport. | Complaints handled outside federation control; binding sanctions and a central public database of banned individuals; a Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policy; annual audits of governing bodies; educational courses and safesport trainings. |
UK — NSPCC Sport | A child-protection unit (NSPCC-led) setting national safeguarding standards for sport. | National Standards as a benchmark; achieving them is a condition of public funding; annual independent safeguarding reviews of governing bodies. |
Australia — Sport Integrity Australia | A government agency giving athletes a single “front door” for integrity and safeguarding complaints. | National Integrity Framework adopted across sports; education; anti-doping testing and investigations; sporting events engagements. |
Learning from these models, we can pick the following design choices: complaints are handled independently of the federation whose officials may be implicated; safeguarding standards are tied to funding and recognition, so compliance is a condition of doing business rather than a voluntary aspiration; a central record prevents sanctioned individuals from resurfacing elsewhere; and education and training to build awareness across all stakeholders – coaches, staff, athletes and parents alike. India cannot afford not to act on this in right earnest.
As the young-athlete base multiplies under the national strategy, putting in the foundational pillars of safety is a necessity, rather than after a generation of avoidable harm. The recommendations that follow translate these proven design choices to the Indian context.
Recommendations
Safeguarding should be treated as strategic infrastructure and resourced as such. Five measures would move India from a mandate on paper to a functioning system:
Establish an independent National Safe Sport body with authority to receive complaints outside federation control, order interim protection, adjudicate impartially, sanction, and maintain a public register of banned individuals.
Broaden the statutory definition of safe sport beyond women and minors to the full international standard—environments free from physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse, harassment, and neglect, for all participants.
Mandate coach certification, background screening, and periodic re-vetting as a condition of holding any position of trust with athletes, with a centralised record that prevents accused individuals from moving quietly between organisations.
Require confidential, independent reporting mechanisms at every centre and academy, with whistleblower protection and a designated, trained safeguarding officer—so reporting no longer runs through the power structure the athlete fears.
Build safeguarding education into the pipeline for coaches, staff, athletes, and parents, so that prevention is cultural and not merely procedural.
The bottom line for policymakers is that safeguarding is not just a moral obligation, which it is, but a strategic one. India's sporting ambition is a systems bet, and safety is the pillar the system stands on. Build it, and the pipeline fills with the trust of a generation of parents and competes with the fearlessness that produces champions. Neglect it, and the most carefully designed talent system in the country's history will keep leaking, at its base, the very talent it was built to raise.
References
This brief draws on Sports Authority of India complaint data reported to Parliament; a 2023 UN Women–UNESCO study on female athletes; contemporaneous press reporting of cases in wrestling, shooting, boxing, athletics, and gymnastics (2023–2026); official Khelo India and Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports figures; and the text of the National Sports Governance Act, 2025.
Comments