Few Shining Stars in Women’s Sports
Indian shuttler PV Sindhu has been creating ripples in the badminton circuit since her silver medal at the Rio 2016 Olympics. In 2019, she added another feather to her cap as she became the first Indian to claim Badminton World Championship held at Basel in August 2019. Sindhu is joined by other Indian women’s sporting personalities, who have brought glory to the country.
These comprise fellow badminton player Saina Nehwal, pugilist Mary Kom, gymnast Hima Das, sprinter Dutee Chand, and cricketers Mithali Raj and Smriti Mandhana. Witnessing their performances has been heartening as we don’t boast of a great past of sportswomen. At the same time, fans rue that the canvass of Indian sportswomen still remains small. For every Hima and Dutee, there are many aspiring and talented girls, who give up on their dreams due to lack of guidance, awareness, training facilities, and cultural barriers.
The Current Scenario of Women’s Sports and CSR Funds
Global promoters of female sportspersons cite that that by the age of 14, many girls are dropping out of sports at two times the rate of boys. The numerous impediments that force many aspiring girls to drop out of sports encompass a lack of access, safety and transportation issues, social stigma, decreased quality of experience, and high costs. Such barriers are even more pronounced and pervasive in the Indian context. In this scenario, corporates through their social responsibility initiatives can change the script in favor of young aspiring girls dreaming to make it big in various sports.
It is heartening to note the role played by conglomerates such as Tatas and JSW Group in promoting sporting talent. Tatas operate three sporting academies dedicated to football, archery, and athletics besides operating a multisport JRD Tata Sports Complex in Jamshedpur. India’s number one female archer, Deepika Kumari is a product of Tata Archery Academy. JSW operates a High-Performance Training Institute for aspiring athletes in Vijayanagar.
Sakshi Malik, the first Indian woman to win a wrestling medal at the Olympics, is a part of JSW’s Sports Excellence Program. However, barring a few examples, sports remain low on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda. Corporate India spent only Rs. 795 crores out of Rs. 49,600 crores of CSR funds towards Sports between FY 2014 and FY 2019, which amounts to a meager 1.6% of the total CSR spend. Fewer opportunities for aspiring women sportspersons mean that only a small percentage of the INR 795 crores was spent on women’s sports.
Reasons for Low CSR Spends on Women’s Sports
Sports experts and professionals attribute various reasons behind the low-spend of CSR budgets on sports projects. The corporates, they point out, prioritize issues such as education or women’s health over sports. Many companies, they add, believe that setting up a school helps educate a few hundred children whereas training just an athlete has a limited impact, clearly missing the inspiring influence one high-performing athlete can have on scores of young aspirants.
They attribute the individual passion of the owner of the private firms for channeling the CSR funds towards sports and not because the CSR committee recommended it. In this scenario, when sports itself score low in the CSR funding priority of the corporates, one can imagine the neglect the female sports aspirants face.
The biggest impediment in this context is the deep-rooted bias against females, be it education or sports opportunities. Remember in 2010, Saina Nehwal revealed that her birth left her grandmother very disappointed as she wanted a boy and even refused to see her until a month after her birth.
Possible Remedies
Like any social change, the pace of progress for female sportspersons will be slow and painful but persistence, patience, and planning are the keys to achieve gender parity in the arena of sports. The sports foundations, sports management firms, change-makers, government officials, and other stakeholders need to have a constant dialogue with corporates on the need for investing CSR funds to promote women’s sports persistently and patiently.
They need to be smart and strategic in developing their plans to promote women’s sports, which include developing creative pathways for corporates to engage with female sportspersons on a long-term basis.
The corporates need to be convinced to play a pivotal role in developing opportunities for young girls at the grassroots level to take up sports by offering basic sports equipment and no-frills playing fields. This low-cost initiative will go a long way towards building a culture of sports at the field level besides producing champion women sportspersons of tomorrow.
The girls, who are not able to progress to a higher level, will derive long-term personality benefits associated with sports and turn into confident young women, a basic feature of any progressive and gender-egalitarian society.
The corporates also must be presented with a strong business case for funding female sportspersons. Analysts of women sports trends point that successful female sports icons can add immense brand value to the companies supporting them. The female sportspersons bring in a huge female fandom along with male fans that provide more exposure to sponsoring companies alongside potential consumers with significant spending power.
More importantly, the corporates can create an association with women sportspersons at a lower price than men’s sports since the trend is still new and awaits to be explored. Hence, supporting female sportspersons makes not just a perfect social sense but also has a strong business logic to it.
Hope for a Better Future
What we see today is just a small glimpse of what Indian women sportspersons can achieve if provided the required support, direction, and encouragement but there is still a huge potential waiting to be tapped. It is difficult to say whether there will be an inflection point in the future which will open the floodgates for CSR funding for women’s sports but it can surely happen gradually provided it is complemented with incessant efforts of different actors involved in promoting aspiring and established female sportspersons.
It is only then we will have more Indian women sportspersons other than shuttler Sindhu, who stood at 13th spot in the Highest-Paid Female Athletes 2019 list released by Forbes, which listed the world’s top 15 female athletes. Many fans of women’s sports in the country eagerly await that moment and it is here that the CSR funds have the potential to play a crucial role in fulfilling the dreams of many promising young female sports aspirants.
Dheeraj Kapoor is a Social Sector Professional based in Mumbai.
