The league culture in India has evolved over the last decade. As with most things league-related, the initiative will need to be taken by the IPL and, to a lesser extent, the PKL and ISL for it to trickle down to the other leagues. Leagues have put a number of sports on the map for broadcasting and awareness, but too often without the required development at grassroots or junior level. Now is the time to add value to the league's verticals by strengthening and strengthening the role of franchises and granting representation and rights to players and staff. If things develop as they should, the next decade will go a long way in creating a tailor-made sports culture in India, which will also result in a broader sports ecosystem framework and consistent good performances across a full range of disciplines. The IPL showed that it was possible. It is now up to others to reproduce it viably. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Growth of a Booming Industry by Joy Bhattacharjya To put things in context about Indian sports, I usually like to recount an incident that happened in late 2014, when my Chilean colleague Javier Ceppi and I went meet with the Ministry of Sports regarding the FIFA U-17 World Cup which will take place in 2017. The mid-level official we met yawned, scratched himself then told us that since we were the hosts, India should definitely have two teams playing, India 'A' and India 'B'. 'Luckily, Javier's understanding of Hindi was not as good as it later became, so I was able to quickly push him out of the room before he understood. An official with around 15 years in the sport believed that a football World Cup could bring together two Indian teams. This is probably a good indication of the quality of personnel currently present in the sports industry. And this is a great reason why we need the best possible minds for Indian sports. This article does not attempt to present an exhaustive list of all possible career options in Indian sports, but rather provides a fairly personal insight into how opportunities and needs have changed dramatically and an idea of ​​the type of talent we will probably have. need to move forward. My first real contact with the sports profession took place in 1996. After an experience in the software field, where I wrote endless COBOL programs to generate salaries for coal power plants located in distant countries, I decided that media and sports suited me better. It was in 1996, while working for the now defunct Business India Television, that I first heard of Transworld International (TWI), whose offices were just above ours. I was introduced to a producer through a colleague and found out they were planning a cricket quiz for Home TV. They had appointed a statistician to ask the questions, but I managed to meet the producer and tried to explain this interesting quiz to him. the questions were generally not just about numbers. They continued with the Statistician, but returned immediately after their first episodes. And from being a freelance question asker, I slowly worked my way up to becoming a producer of the show. My path was not unique. At that time, the Internet had not even reached India and there were absolutely no search agencies torecruit for sports professionals. In the TWI office, literally all the staff were either walk-ins or referrals. There was even an employee whom TWI's production manager found crying in the lobby of a corporate headquarters because she had failed a job interview. He hired her on the spot and, for good measure, also hired her sister a few months later! At that time, it was a heady feeling working in sports, especially Indian cricket and football, but the one question I inevitably asked myself The question asked was: "Why should a country of a billion people does he earn so little? And unfortunately, the only part of the question that really changed was that over the next decade, the number in question went from 1 billion people to 1.2 billion people. If one has to consider an inflection point in Indian sports, it would have to be 2008. Abhinav Bindra's Olympic gold medal was a massive breakthrough. While Leander's incredible bronze in 1996 put us in contention for a medal after heartbreaking appeals from Milkha Singh and PT Usha, Bindra was the one who reached the top. And it made a huge difference. Being a medalist was great; being the best in the world went even further. The other revolution in Indian sports came with the start of the IPL in the same year. The event had less to do with the cricket, which was already at a fairly high standard, and more to do with the way it was organized and delivered. I remember dealing with a member of the Indian cricket board on a routine matter in the mid-2000s, and my mail was duly downloaded by a secretary, printed and placed on the gentleman's table. He then dictated a response, which was typed, printed and mailed back after a week. During the first week of the IPL, with new challenges every day, I sent a mail to the same organization at 7 pm on a clarification regarding player eligibility. I received an acknowledgment within one minute and a detailed memo describing all possible exceptions to the rule and their interpretation, notified to all competing franchises within the hour. The IPL brought a professionalism to the way Indian sport was run that was rarely seen otherwise on a concerted basis. And we probably needed it as much as our future stars. How important is it to cover sports well? In 2000, we began our first session of the ESPN School Quiz Olympiad, with Harsha Bhogle as host. It was an absolute revelation; we were blown away by how much the kids in the 9th and 10th standards of the competition knew about international sport. Their knowledge of any sport regularly shown on cable television was absolutely brilliant. But everything going on in India beyond cricket, especially women's sport, was a real black hole. I remember one particular sequence where a visual of Leeds United footballer Harry Kewell was responded to in a flash, with the other two teams distraught at not pressing their buzzer in time. In the same episode, a photo of Shiny Abraham, one of India's best athletes, was shown. The first team tried PT Usha; the other two didn't even have names to guess. If there was a reason for this, it was the absolutely terrible coverage of Indian sports on television. The real revolution began there in 1993, when Jagmohan Dalmiya and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), tired of being pushed around by Doordarshan, sold the rights to Indian cricket to IMG, with the show being produced by TWI, the IMG company. arm of.