As I enter the practice field at Kalinga Sports Complex in Bhubaneswar, one thing stands out amid the infrastructural heraldry. On the full-size football field that has around 40 athletes, between the ages of 14 and 18, most are girls. One of them is Banya Kabiraj, 15, captain of the Indian women’s U-16 football team.
The midfielder dances past tackles and passes the ball to a teammate on the left, who doesn’t quite have the pace to match. Kabiraj is livid. Neither her movement nor technique nor passion betray her age. She is one of 137 girls who live in the Bhubaneswar Sports Hostel, which has 240 budding athletes. The girls far outnumber the boys here.
World over, sports is a male bastion — not simply in participation, but also opportunity and popularity. More so, in India. In the past three decades, however, the Odisha government has been trying to stoke a revolution by not just moving the State into a position of sporting power, but also getting the most marginalised and oppressed groups to the fore.
At the heart of this is the Odisha Sports Hostel programme, started in 1985. The hostels are the final step in an elaborate scouting programme that reaches out to students between aged 10 to 14 in schools across the State. Selected students are sent to one of 16 hostels, across 15 districts, depending on the sport and their location. The one in Bhubaneswar is the most well-developed and elite of the lot, housing the best. And students often come from the poorest families.
Santi Murmu, 15, joined the hostel three years ago, with the unflinching support of her parents. Her father is a daily-wage labourer and her mother is a homemaker. It wasn’t an easy decision to let her pursue her sporting dreams. “Hum bohot gareeb ghar se hai na, is liye thoda mushkil hota hain (We’re very poor, so it’s a little difficult),” Murmu says. “But my parents still want me to do what I do best — play football. When I got selected for the U-16 camp last year, it was all worth it,” she says, smiling widely.
A practice session at Bhubaneswar’s Kalinga Sports Complex. | Photo Credit: Biswaranjan Rout
“We provide coaching in 11 sports, six of which are classified as ‘priority’ sports — athletics, hockey, archery, football, weightlifting and badminton,” says Vishal Dev, secretary of the Sports & Youth Services department. “Each priority sport has a three-tier structure — beginner, mid-level and senior, to ensure a focused approach.” The government recognises that sports must come from the ‘grassroots’, so the scouting programme starts at the gram panchayat level.
But all scouting will be fruitless if a culture of sports and games isn’t instilled among children at an early age. The urban areas often take care of themselves because of a wider availability of sporting infrastructure and facilities, so the villages are where the government stepped in. Today, Odisha has 314 ‘rural stadiums’ — that’s an impressive average of more than 10 a district.
These rural stadia, called ‘mini stadiums’, are little more than gated and walled spaces with trimmed grass, bare-bones seating and a sparse changing room, but they are yet far more than what villagers have seen. “The mini stadium means sports is taken a bit more seriously,” says Deogarh’s Ajay Sahu. “Earlier, we used to play on any patch of vacant land. After the stadiums were built, we’ve started holding regular tournaments, and sports officials attend,” he says.
While the doors to sport don’t open that easily even today, they were practically bolted shut for these kids two decades ago. Odisha had no women’s football team, for instance, till the 90s. That was when chance pushed Shradhanjali Samantaray and her band of merry women on to the pitch. “I used to play kho kho earlier,” says the former women’s football captain. “The men’s football team, cricketers, we all practised on the same field, and one day in 1992, the then coach of the men’s team, Chandan Chanda, came up and said Odisha needed to send a women’s team to the national football championship in Assam.”
Samantaray and the others on her kho kho team didn’t have the slightest clue about football, let alone skill, technique or ability. “We resisted, but Chanda coaxed us with the lure of travelling by plane,” she says. They played West Bengal, Kerala, and Manipur, losing with scores like 0-22, 0-27.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” she says. But the humiliation spurred them, and a large group shifted to football permanently. “We had heard of Maradona and followed him through the 1994 World Cup to pick up skills.” Then, Samantaray got selected for the Indian national team in 1995, and there was no looking back.
Nineteen years after their drubbing in Assam, in 2012, Samantaray scored in the finals of the same tournament as Odisha beat Bengal 5-0 for a truly fairytale ending, propping the State up as formidable foes in the women’s game. She was appointed captain the next year.
While the Odisha sports tale is one of steely resolve, what continually holds the State back is its perception as ‘backward’. “We don’t get much focus from the mainstream national media,” says R. Vineel Krishna, director, Sports & Youth services. “We have to scream hoarse to make ourselves heard. Unless you give people reasons visit, nobody will come here,” he says.
Another worry is the high attrition after a certain age. P. Dharma Rao, a weightlifting coach at the Bhubaneswar hostel, attributes this to the government job players get when they represent State or country. “A lot of the children are from poor families; their parents allow them to join the hostels because of the lure of a job,” says Rao. “But this means that once a player gets a job in the Railways or the police, they drop out of sports. That’s detrimental to the system, and a waste of our years of effort.”
The other worry is the chronic shortage of coaches in some sports. This means many talents get left by the wayside. Sahu, 15, is one such. “I wanted to play football, but because we don’t have coaches in Deogarh, the scouts don’t come here,” he says.
Over the years, Odisha has been sending a steady stream of players to the national teams. Dutee Chand became the third ever woman to qualify for the 100 metres sprint at the Olympics in 2016. Dipsan Tirkey and Amit Rohidas were part of the men’s hockey team that won the Asia Cup in Dhaka last year. Lilima Minz, Namita Toppo, Deep Grace Ekka, Sunita Lakra and Rashmita Minz were part of the hockey team that won the women’s Asia Cup in Japan last year. Bhubaneswar, meanwhile, will host the men’s hockey World Cup in November-December this year.
I ask Kabiraj who her icon is. “Ronaldo, of course! He makes and scores his own goals, and doesn’t wait for service like Messi,” she says. I am miffed, but we move on. “In India, it’s Shradhanjali didi,” she adds. “We all want to do what she did.”
saurya.s@thehindu.co.in