Top firms game for netting, nurturing sporting talent

Sports is attracting more and more companies wanting to do their bit to search and promote talent. While the $10-million Mittal Champions Trust, which is a couple of years old, has already claimed Olympic gold medallist Abhinav Bindra as its product, Tata Steel, four of whose archers are competing in the Beijing Olympics, is busy casting its net wider.

Tata Steel, which has set up three national academies for football, archery and athletics, respectively, all in Jamshedpur, is now doing something more intense. It is scanning every school in and around the steel city to find talent and is appointing coaches for football, volleyball, handball and chess in these schools to groom the youngsters to be world-class players.
 

Indian companies and sportsmanship
Companies	Activities

Spending

Tata SteelRuns football,archery 
and athletics academies 

Rs 5 crore 
a year

Arcelor Mittal: Mittal Champion Trust $ 10 million 
fund DCM Sriram: Holds DSEL Tennis Championsip — ITC:  Organises Sunfeast Open Tennis — Coke: Sponsors sportsmen to 
Olympics— RIL: Reliance IPL $ 110 million
over 10 years

The project took off this year. Dronacharya awardee Sanjeev Singh, the head of sports for Tata Steel, says this will show others the way.

This is the reverse of the model the company had tried with its three academies, where children were brought from schools. “We will now take coaches to the students,” says Singh.

“We have covered 14 schools and have lined up 40 more. A football centre has been started in a school, which will back just this one sport,” says Singh. “Another school will become a centre for chess, another for volleyball, and so on, and everyone will benefit,” he said. Tata Steel, which annually spends Rs 5 crore on its three academies, will raise this amount further.

What the company is doing in the city’s schools has taken a different form in the mine areas, where it is facing trouble with rehabilitation. It has set up three feeder centres to recruit young archers, soccer players and athletes who are being trained by the company’s coaches in the villages itself.

“We have appointed coaches in four sites — Kalinganagar in Orissa where mining is yet to take off following a standoff with the community, Nuvamundi in Jharkhand, and West Bokaro. The fourth centre will be set up in Jamadoba in Jharkhand this month,” he said. “Exceptionally good talent will be taken to the academies in Jamshedpur,” says Singh.

In the last ten years, archers from the academy have won several gold medals for India, says Singh. “I spotted Jayant in Assam, Rajiv Basumatarai in Assam and V Pranita in Andhra Pradesh,” he says.

But the company’s oldest association has been with football. The football academy, started 50 years ago, accounts for 80 per cent players in all under-19 teams in the country, Singh says.

In fact, all professional teams take players from the academy by paying guge amounts. This year, the players went for Rs 15 lakh, says a Tata spokesman.