As the train chugged into Mandawar station in Rajasthan, lanky 12-year-old Brijesh Kumar Sain had mixed feelings; slight fear overpowered by excitement and hope. It was going to be his first train ride and the first time he stepped foot out of his village. His friends were giggling with joy and amazement as the train pulled in. Standing by them, tall and athletic, was the German lady who had walked into their village in 2010 and is their hockey coach, friend and guide, Andrea Thumshirn. Her smile reassured Sain.
He told himself that his team was going to win their first hockey match. Now 16 years old, Sain says “We did not win. We were up against Delhi Public School in Jaipur. It was our first-ever match. But after a couple of more matches, we were able to improve our technique and performed better.”
Sain is one of the students who signed up for the Hockey Village India (HVI) programme started by Thumshirn in Rajasthan. “I heard about a foreign lady who was teaching children in the old fort. I thought, what a strange game this is,” he remembers. The shy Sain reluctantly signed up, not sure what difference this would make. But soon, he began to enjoy the sport, the interaction and picked up a smattering of English. He played for two consecutive years in Germany in a sub-junior hockey team as part of the programme and lived with a German family.
Sain believes that his horizon has expanded and today, he has inspired his brother to join the project. “I was never like this. I only knew my home and school, and then hockey transformed me. I am confident, I speak better and I have a dream for myself,” says the son of a village barber who aspires to make it to the Indian hockey team one day.
“Simply put, sports does not exist in the culture here,” says Thumshirn, a former hockey player in Germany’s junior team. For her first practice session in India, she managed to get 60 hockey sticks and had over 100 boys and girls outside her front door. “Children are curious by nature and they love to run and play. We encourage girls to join the team as we know that it will make a big change in their lives. Sports can harness team spirit, leadership skills, commitment, time management and much more,” she says. Thumshirn adds that getting children to show up for practice, keeping them motivated and teaching them the right techniques—as most of them had never seen a hockey stick before—was a big task.
Murthy Megavan, founder of the Covelong Point Social Surf School in Chennai, agrees and says sports has the power to attract, mobilise and inspire people. In 2003, when he bought his first surfboard and practiced, folks from the fishing hamlet would laugh. In time, a group of children showed interest, and that sparked the idea for this fisherman-turned-surfer to realise his dream of opening a surfing school in the fishing village.
“Their keen interest motivated me and I decided that through the school, I could do my bit to improve the life of my fellow villagers,” says Megavan. “I told the young lads that I would buy them surfboards and teach for free if they adhered to my condition of no drinking, no smoking and supporting community welfare programmes,” says the 36-year-old, who had been actively supporting an NGO near his village.
Since its inception in 2012, Murthy’s school has trained 50 youth in the age group of 10 to 35 and has conducted medical camps, coastal clean-up programmes and helped abandon tsunami victims in and around Kovalam. “The progress is visible. Today, my boys are well-groomed, well-mannered and responsible. Surfing has opened up new avenues for them and has been a catalyst for positive change,” explains Murthy, who has just returned with his team from a surf competition in Sri Lanka.
“Children who are involved with sports have higher levels of focus, are confident and learn to manage their time well. They realise the importance of hard work and learn to deal with success and failure better than those who are not involved with sports,” says Irina Singh, applied sports psychologist, founder of Chandigarh’s Sport Psych India and former Ladies Golf National Champion. She adds that participation in sports gives a great sense of achievement and increases their feelings of self-worth and self-efficacy.
Chanda Jat, 18, from Falichda village in Rajasthan’s Udaipur district has become sort of a role model and mentor; her presence gives a lot of hope and inspiration to the girls. She joined the Sports For Empowerment Programme initiated by Vikalp Sansthan, a charitable organisation in Udaipur, and became part of the volleyball team. Through sports and life skill training, she came to understand more about life, her rights and her health. “Chanda Jat raised her voice and said she will not marry at such a young age. She faced struggle, but finally won. She completed her Class X through distance education, and now aims to complete her graduation to become a Physical Instruction teacher,” says Usha Choudhary, one of the founding members of Vikalp Sansthan.
Taking the Sports for Empowerment initiative, Jat visits eight villages and has motivated nearly 100 girls to continue their education. When Choudhary and her friends started the Sports For Empowerment Programme in 2014, they reached out to girls who dropped out of school. “When we shared the idea with the girls, 50 of them from the village turned up. They were excited and curious,” says Choudhary.
In 2001, M C Roy and his friend formed the Society for the Rehabilitation of the Visually Challenged (SRVC) in Kerala. “The main aim was to provide vocational training,” says Roy. His colleague Sunil Mathew was asked by a visually challenged boy if he could play football. That stemmed the idea of a national blind football team. Mathew did some research on the Internet and found interesting statistics. “A country like Brazil with a population of 198 million has 660 visually challenged football teams, while India, with a population of 1.2 billion, has never put up five people for such a tournament,” says Mathew. “That was the impetus for SRVC and the Indian Blind Sports Association to form a team in 2013.” Today, the team comprises players from Delhi, Dehradun, Mumbai, Kolkata and Kochi. This has helped in integration. “A visually challenged player from Jodhpur has to learn to communicate and play with one from Kochi,” says Mathew, who coaches the team.
For Akshai Abraham Founder of Project KHEL (Kids Holistic Education and Life-skills), a Lucknow-based organisation that uses sports to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds grow into responsible citizens, sports had always played an important role in shaping his life and helped him deal with difficulties. “The idea of starting a sports-based programme for underprivileged children had been lingering for quite some time and took shape in 2012,” says Abraham, adding that the aim of his initiative is not to make children professional players in any sport but to connect with them and impart life skills using sports and outdoor activities.
“We have seen immense improvement in our children in confidence, public speaking, gender sensitivity, reduction in tobacco use, bad language and violence,” says Abraham. For Project Khel, schools, administrators and families have been really participative and helpful. “Initially, when we approached schools, there was hesitation and resistance to the idea. However, once principals and teachers began to see the changes in children, they became our biggest supporters,” he says.
Though the project works with schools, they also conduct programmes for children who live on the streets, in slums, shelter homes and children of domestic and migrant labour, providing them opportunities to play football, volleyball, handball, ultimate frisbee, kho kho and kabaddi.
Praveen P K, the founder of Foot & Boot Football School, a training and learning institution in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, which promotes grassroots-level football, says, “Football is something I’ve been associated with right from school.” Praveen, who has a D License for coaching football from the All India Football Federation, adds that the philosophy of the organisation is to develop good human beings who are technically confident, creative, understand the game and make excellent decisions. Like most other social innovators, resistance against change has been the biggest challenge. Praveen has been working closely with participants to get them out of their comfort zone, and onto a level playing field.
Every Saturday from 3 to 5 pm, over 25 children gather at an abandoned warehouse near Kolkata’s Lake Gardens, also known as the city’s first skate park. Started in 2013 by Aaron Walling and his wife Debora, Kolkata Skateboarding began with a mission to create a safe and creative environment where children can develop important life skills such as courage, leadership and cooperation. The first skateboarding session had about 10 children from the neighbourhood, of which a few became the first set of members to this club. “Sports can help children develop so many skills, but what I love about skateboarding is that it’s not a competitive sport. It is fundamentally creative, where you can express your unique personality, ideas and skills while you enjoy the sport with your friends,” say the Wallings, who moved back to the US and let the club continue under the leadership of volunteers.
In 2008, when the Indian hockey team failed to qualify for the Beijing Olympics, K Arumugam decided to start an NGO called the Hockey Citizen Group in Delhi, and One Thousand Legs was the first project under that umbrella. Through this, he wanted to provide school children an opportunity to understand, play and enjoy hockey. He decided to start distributing sporting equipment to each school. He would ferry children and the coach in his car to practice. Seeing his commitment, more children are starting to enquire about what he was doing, thus increasing the number of learners. “This kind of sports education has also helped better school attendance,” says Arumugam. Empowering children through sports is a dream he is now realising every day and hopes to enrol at least 500 children into the programme each year.
When he was 20 years old, Siddhartha Upadhyay used his small savings to start an NGO in 2000, which would empower youth in rural, remote and backward areas through sports. He bought some basic equipment and went to the open fields to play with children. “Every child has a right to play, and that right must be respected,” says the founder and secretary general of Stairs (Society for Transformation, Inclusion and Recognition through Sports) based in Delhi. Since its inception in 2000, it has created multiple platforms for children across India to play with best equipment for free.
Stairs School Football League is the only school-level league in India that promotes football at the grassroots level. “The idea is to give every enthusiastic child an equal opportunity to play in the league. Today, we have spread our wings from Delhi-NCR to Ahmedabad. It has become one of the most significant talent spotting platforms for clubs and bodies seeking to acquire talent at an early age,” says Upadhyay.
In 2013, at TedxGateway Mumbai, 13-year-old Kusum paused for the thunderous applause to stop before she could continue to share stories from her maiden visit to Spain to play in a football tournament representing Yuwa, a Jharkhand-based organisation. She belongs to a remote village in Jharkhand where football is not ‘even for the boys’. “We played for each other, we won for each other. We went out, even at night. We did everything that boys could do,” says Kusum. Back home, she’s welcomed by the village as a ‘princess’.
Her team captain, 15-year-old Rinky, wasn’t so lucky. In spite of leading Yuwa’s U-14 women’s football team to a third place in the Gasteiz Cup in Spain, Rinky was scolded by her teacher for missing school to give a talk at TEDxIIFT Delhi. Most of the other girls belonging to villages of Ormanjhi block, 20 km from the state capital Ranchi, have a tough beginning and a tougher journey. Playing internationally is turning the tables for good, but things move slow in this part of the world.
“It’s one of the toughest regions for a girl. We’ve had a hard time convincing parents why it’s important to invest equally in a girl child,” Yuwa’s co-founder Franz Gastler says. In the last seven years, they’ve tried to place every girl’s future in their own hands. “The hurdles haven’t vanished, but the girls have become better fighters,” says 34-year-old Gastler.
These sports-led social innovators have faced several barriers, yet have taken the challenges head on. From lack of participation to over-enthusiastic children, they believe that every practice session makes a big difference for children, families and the community. Some of these children may take up sports professionally, while for some it may just be a leisure activity and for many others, it may become a faded memory. Whether it was during one game or during a hundred, they have adopted crucial life skills that will draw their future grid. Their stint with sports goes beyond bronze, silver and gold. It is one that will linger for a lifetime.
With Ayesha Singh, Shevlin Sebastian and Nidhi Raj Singh