Stairway to Olympic success
Stairs, a Delhi-based NGO, is enabling young athletes to realise their sporting potential
 "Stairway to Olympic success")
It used to be a shady park in a seedy north Delhi neighbourhood, where men played cards during the day and peddled drugs by night. It took the building of a volleyball court to transform not just the park but also the entire community. Today, the park resonates with the sounds of boys playing extremely competitive volleyball. Next door, just across the Ring Road, boys from Majnu ka Tila are going crazy over a sport that few have heard of or played: sepak takraw, the national game of Malaysia.
To call it volleyball played with the feet is doing the sport a grave injustice, for it is a volatile game that requires excellent fitness levels and balance. Today, half of India's national sepak takraw team comes from this community. Some credit for this transformation goes to Delhi-based Stairs Foundation, an NGO driven by the mission to facilitate children's "right to play", and create a support system to elevate them.
Stairs Foundation was started when its founder, self-confessed "serial" entrepreneur Siddhartha Upadhyay, realised that he owed much of his business success to the values that he had imbibed playing sports in his youth. "It amazed me that in spite of the huge talent that I'm convinced is hidden across the country, we consistently performed so poorly in international sporting events," he says. For example, while touring Odisha, he and his team came across the Khasi hockey tournament, a local hockey contest played among tribal people there, in which the prize was one goat - locally called Khasi. Over 10 Olympians had emerged over the years through this one tournament alone, they found. "The question on my mind was, why haven't we capitalised on this and developed this talent till it became world class," says Upadhyay.
The answer lay in developing a sporting culture, which facilitated the youth's engagement and training in sports, and thereafter, worked on nurturing young talent. Founded with this aim, this mostly self-funded organisation works in seven states today, engaging as many as 300,000 youngsters aged 12 and above. Additionally, Stairs has started what promises to be the world's largest football talent scouting and training programme in Delhi and Gujarat - involving 16,000 budding footballers every year.
How they operate is simple. "First off, we gauge the interest of a community in a specific sport, provide them with equipment, a place to play, and most important, a good coach.
To call it volleyball played with the feet is doing the sport a grave injustice, for it is a volatile game that requires excellent fitness levels and balance. Today, half of India's national sepak takraw team comes from this community. Some credit for this transformation goes to Delhi-based Stairs Foundation, an NGO driven by the mission to facilitate children's "right to play", and create a support system to elevate them.
Stairs Foundation was started when its founder, self-confessed "serial" entrepreneur Siddhartha Upadhyay, realised that he owed much of his business success to the values that he had imbibed playing sports in his youth. "It amazed me that in spite of the huge talent that I'm convinced is hidden across the country, we consistently performed so poorly in international sporting events," he says. For example, while touring Odisha, he and his team came across the Khasi hockey tournament, a local hockey contest played among tribal people there, in which the prize was one goat - locally called Khasi. Over 10 Olympians had emerged over the years through this one tournament alone, they found. "The question on my mind was, why haven't we capitalised on this and developed this talent till it became world class," says Upadhyay.
The answer lay in developing a sporting culture, which facilitated the youth's engagement and training in sports, and thereafter, worked on nurturing young talent. Founded with this aim, this mostly self-funded organisation works in seven states today, engaging as many as 300,000 youngsters aged 12 and above. Additionally, Stairs has started what promises to be the world's largest football talent scouting and training programme in Delhi and Gujarat - involving 16,000 budding footballers every year.
How they operate is simple. "First off, we gauge the interest of a community in a specific sport, provide them with equipment, a place to play, and most important, a good coach.
Since 2011, Stairs Foundation's Khelo programme, which is spread across different states, has produced eight international and 12 national-level sepak takraw players and five national-level volleyball players. A female powerlifter from its Khelo Jharkhand programme won a gold medal at the 2012 South Asian Powerlifting Championship.
The Stairs School Football League (SSFL) - sponsored by Uflex - has also provided advanced training to 349 young footballers through its partnership with the German Football Association. "Give us a couple of years," promises Upadhyay, "and we'll definitely produce some great football talent in India."
More important, sports has helped transform the lives of countless underprivileged youths, giving them a sense of discipline and purpose. Many of them have been recruited by the army and state security forces, mainly due to their sports credentials. On the anvil is an ambitious plan to spread the Khelo programme to 4,000 villages across the country. Upadhyay also hopes to engage 100,000 footballers through Stairs's football league.
There is, however, a step between identifying sporting talent and winning international medals that Indian sport currently lacks. "While we have the infrastructure for engagement and training in sports, we lack facilities where people with proven talent can get advanced training and conditioning necessary to take their game to the next level," says Upadhyay
To this end, Stairs is planning to create centres of sporting excellence in and around Delhi for starters, which will have coaches, sports doctors and motivators. "This will require an annual outlay of at least Rs 2 crore per centre," he says. The hunt for sponsors is on.
Winners of the 2016 Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Puruskar and the 2015 Ficci award for being the Best NGO for Promoting Sports in India, Stairs has created easily scalable and replicable models for spreading the culture of sports at the grassroot level. "We're connecting the dots on a very small scale right now," says Upadhyay. "Imagine what we can achieve if we ignited sporting passion across the country." It may still be early days, but Upadhyay and his team look well on their way to turning around India's dismal fortunes at major international sporting competitions.
The Stairs School Football League (SSFL) - sponsored by Uflex - has also provided advanced training to 349 young footballers through its partnership with the German Football Association. "Give us a couple of years," promises Upadhyay, "and we'll definitely produce some great football talent in India."
More important, sports has helped transform the lives of countless underprivileged youths, giving them a sense of discipline and purpose. Many of them have been recruited by the army and state security forces, mainly due to their sports credentials. On the anvil is an ambitious plan to spread the Khelo programme to 4,000 villages across the country. Upadhyay also hopes to engage 100,000 footballers through Stairs's football league.
There is, however, a step between identifying sporting talent and winning international medals that Indian sport currently lacks. "While we have the infrastructure for engagement and training in sports, we lack facilities where people with proven talent can get advanced training and conditioning necessary to take their game to the next level," says Upadhyay
To this end, Stairs is planning to create centres of sporting excellence in and around Delhi for starters, which will have coaches, sports doctors and motivators. "This will require an annual outlay of at least Rs 2 crore per centre," he says. The hunt for sponsors is on.
Winners of the 2016 Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Puruskar and the 2015 Ficci award for being the Best NGO for Promoting Sports in India, Stairs has created easily scalable and replicable models for spreading the culture of sports at the grassroot level. "We're connecting the dots on a very small scale right now," says Upadhyay. "Imagine what we can achieve if we ignited sporting passion across the country." It may still be early days, but Upadhyay and his team look well on their way to turning around India's dismal fortunes at major international sporting competitions.
For more information, visit www.stairs.org.in
Next fortnight, the story of an organisation that is making organic agriculture economically viable for the small farmers of Uttarakhand
Next fortnight, the story of an organisation that is making organic agriculture economically viable for the small farmers of Uttarakhand