The 1,857 Cr. Question (USD 194.8 Mln): What Is India's Sports Goods Scheme For, and Who Can Actually Use It?

The Cabinet has put USD 194.8 million (INR 1,857 Crs.) behind sports goods manufacturing over eight years. We read the scheme, the report underneath it and India’s own customs data. The industry it funds is not the one most of the coverage thinks it is, and its exports have not grown in a decade.

1. What was approved

On 28 October 2026 the Union Cabinet approved the Khelo India Sports Goods Manufacturing Scheme. Sources: Press Information Bureau (PIB) PRID 2329701 and PMIndia. Both read in full.

Eight years. Two investment thresholds. A third of the money unassigned.

2. Two industries, not one — and the difference is the whole story

Almost every report on this scheme mixes up two different industries. They are about five times apart in size. Get this clear first and the rest of the piece follows.

Sports goods is the whole industry: apparel, footwear, equipment and accessories. Globally it was worth roughly USD 700bn in 2024.

Sports equipment is the hardware alone: bats, balls, racquets, treadmills, nets, protective gear. Globally it was worth roughly USD 140bn — about a fifth of the sports goods industry — and is projected at ~USD 283bn by 2036.

The USD 140bn figure now circulating as "the global sports goods market" is the equipment market. It is the smaller of the two, and it is the one that matters here.

What this scheme actually covers

The government's definition covers equipment: ball-over-net sports, ball games, fitness and strength equipment — treadmills and gym kit, the largest global sub-segment at 33% of all equipment — athletic training, water sports, golf, racquets, protective gear, nets. The customs basket is Harmonised System (HS) code 9506.

Fitness and gym equipment is inside the definition. This is the most common error in the coverage.

Outside it: sportswear, athletic footwear, and accessories — bags, headwear, socks, wearables. Those sit under textile and footwear codes. Bicycles sit separately, under HS 8712.

That single line decides who can use this money. We return to it in Section 3.

The two government export figures, and who says what

India's own government publishes two different numbers for the same thing.

The Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCI&S) — the Ministry of Commerce's official trade statistics office — records HS 9506 exports of USD 196.75m in FY2024-25. That is the customs record.

NITI Aayog (the National Institution for Transforming India, the government's policy think tank) and the PIB both use USD 275m, in NITI's March 2026 report on the sector. The basket behind that number is wider and has not been published.

We print both. The gap is USD 78m — 40% of the smaller figure — and it is between two arms of the same government.

The fact this piece turns on

On India's own customs data, sports equipment exports have not grown in a decade.

Flat since 2018. This is DGCI&S, not a forecast. Every target attached to this scheme asks that line to reverse, not continue.

India's shape

How India compares — one basis, one year

HS 9506 exports and imports, calendar 2023, UN Comtrade. The only basis on which these countries are genuinely comparable.

Read the last column, not the first. China's sports equipment export industry is a gym equipment industry. Britain's is a golf industry. Pakistan's is a football industry — one product, 71% of its exports, and it still out-exports India by 75%.

India's is not published at line level in any source we could find — which is itself the point. The government claims 75–80% of the world's cricket bats. It does not publish what India's biggest export line is by value.

Three more things that table says.

Fitness and gym equipment is the top import line for the UK, Australia, Brazil, Pakistan, the USA and India. China supplies 51% of UK imports, 54% of Australia's, 55% of America's, 73% of Brazil's. The world buys its gyms from one country.

China as "40–50%", not a decimal. The 2023 world total rests on 126 reporting countries, down from 132, with Vietnam, Taiwan, Cambodia and Korea absent. So any precise share is an upper bound. NITI independently says 40–50%. Taiwan cannot be placed at all — Comtrade folds it into "Other Asia, not elsewhere specified" — though it supplied 13.3% of all US HS 9506 imports in 2023, second only to China.

Brazil is the counter-example. Fifth-largest country by population, a football nation, host of a World Cup and an Olympics. It exports USD 17m of sports equipment and imports eleven times that, 73% of it from China. India, at USD 187m, is a ten times larger sports equipment exporter than Brazil. Sporting culture does not build a manufacturing industry. Neither do mega-events.

For scale on the other side: China's own statistics bureau puts sports goods and related manufacturing gross output at CNY 1.5251 trillion in 2024 — roughly USD 214bn, 39.7% of China's total sports industry output. (That figure includes apparel and footwear. It is not comparable with the customs table above. We flag it because it will be quoted at you.)

What INR 1,857 crore is actually worth

The eight-year sports goods scheme costs less than two months of the DA increase approved at the same meeting. Its entire eight-year outlay is almost exactly one year's turnover of the Meerut cluster.

3. Who is in this industry, and who is not

The scheme funds equipment. So this is the equipment industry — not the sportswear brands most readers will think of first.

A. The global equipment names

Decathlon, Yonex, Wilson, Head, Mikasa, Molten, Amer Sports, Technogym, Life Fitness. Most are brand-and-design businesses that outsource manufacturing across Asia. That decides what India is competing for: brands, or factories.

The scheme invites them. PMIndia says Anchor Investment Support exists "to encourage leading domestic and global manufacturers, brands and retail chains" into the zones.

Only one has an India manufacturing position worth the name. Decathlon has a EUR 100m India plan, mostly retail, a Technical Development Centre in Mohali, and sourcing out of Coimbatore, Madurai, Surat, Ludhiana, Mohali and Mumbai. Its South West Asia production director: "We need to scale up significantly from producing basic products to more technical products."

For every other global equipment name, we could find no Indian manufacturing plan.

And a note on who is not here. Nike, Adidas, Puma and Skechers are apparel and footwear businesses. The scheme's own underpinning report puts apparel and footwear outside the sector it measures. Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal met Nike's leadership in Milwaukee on 12 October — sixteen days before Cabinet approved this scheme — on domestic manufacturing and local sourcing. No commitment was announced. The brands being courted are not the industry being funded.

B. The Indian incumbents

From Registrar of Companies (RoC) filings. Note how little of this is public at all.

Cosco is the only company on this list with publicly audited, line-by-line accounts. Everything else is a capital band on a filings aggregator, or nothing.

The scheme's best terms need a minimum capital commitment of INR 100 crore (USD 10.49m). Its entry tier needs INR 10 crore (USD 1.05m).

Look at that table — the paid-up capital, the revenue bands, the firms whose numbers are not public at all. Do you think any of these companies can fund a INR 100 crore investment?

C. The conglomerates

Reliance, Adani, JSW, Aditya Birla, Tata. Any of them could build capability in this sector quickly. They have the balance sheets, the industrial land, the export channels, and in JSW's and Adani's case, sports businesses already.

None has shown any interest. We could find no sports goods manufacturing plan, investment or statement from any of them. FY2027 capital expenditure coverage returns energy, infrastructure and data centres only.

A INR 1,130 crore anchor pot, in a sector where the only companies capable of using it have not asked for it.

4. Why it was done

Every target year in the supporting material is 2036. That is the Olympic bid year, not an industrial-policy horizon.

NITI asked for four times as much, and said subsidy alone would not work. It recommended INR 7,500 cr (USD 786.7m) over five years. Cabinet approved 24.8% of that, over 1.6 times the period — about 15% of the recommended annual spend.

NITI's warning, in its own words: without structural fixes, subsidies would have to cover roughly INR 7,300 cr of cumulative cost disability over 2027–31, which it calls "fiscally unsustainable." With structural fixes, about INR 1,700 cr would do.

The structural problem the money does not touch. India carries a ~15% average cost disadvantage against Asian peers, 77% of it structural — raw-material duties and machinery costs — while global sourcing decisions turn on 2–3%. Customs duties of 10–20% apply to raw materials India does not make. Carbon fibre: no domestic production at all. Pakistan imports it duty-free. Polyurethane and thermoplastic polyurethane cost ~30% more here than in China. Domestic metals cost 10–15% more because of Quality Control Orders (QCOs).

The Budget that preceded this scheme gave duty relief to footwear and leather. Not to sports goods raw materials.

NITI's own category table shows India is competitive only where the input is wood or leather: cricket bats 0–5% better than Pakistan, protective gear ~23% better than the UK — against table tennis 30–35% worse, composite hockey sticks 25–26% worse, leather boxing gloves against Pakistan 25–30% worse.

5. How will it be measured?

We read the PIB release, the PMIndia release, the PIB backgrounder and the ministerial briefing. Here is what is in them.

Monitoring committee: NOT FOUND. Key performance indicators or interim milestones: NOT FOUND. Disbursement conditions beyond the two investment thresholds: NOT FOUND. Audit mechanism: NOT FOUND. Claw-back or penalty provisions: NOT FOUND. Sunset clause: NOT FOUND. Implementing agency: not named. Scheme guidelines: not published as of 31 October.

The numbers that are attached are not targets. USD 8.1bn of exports and ~54 lakh jobs by 2036 are NITI projections, not scheme commitments. Against current sector employment of around 500,000, the jobs figure is a tenfold claim with no milestone behind it. Railways and Information Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw's ~INR 6,800 cr of expected investment implies roughly sixfold leverage on INR 1,130 cr, with no published basis.

The two templates the government already has

The Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme (ECMS) is structurally almost identical — 20–25% capital subsidy plus turnover-linked incentives. It publishes: no upfront disbursement; capital released in tranches against verified milestones, including commercial-production trial runs, third-party cleanroom audits and asset-utilisation checks; progressive annual Domestic Value Addition targets, audited before disbursement; a named project management agency; and deliberately lower entry thresholds for small firms. Result by August 2026: 106 approved applications, INR 69,548 cr of committed private capital against a INR 59,350 cr target.

The Container Manufacturing Promotion Scheme, approved by the same Cabinet on the same day at INR 10,000 cr, published targets: 7.5 lakh Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) of capacity, ~3,000 direct and 50,000+ indirect jobs.

So why is the sports ministry not using the templates already set?

The design exists, inside the same government, written down and working.

One scheme approved that morning got milestone-linked tranches, third-party audits, small-firm entry tiers and a project management agency. Another got published capacity and jobs targets. The sports goods scheme got two investment thresholds and a press release.

The ministry that now runs a INR 1,856.67 crore manufacturing programme is the one whose existing INR 1,000 crore sports budget went 30% unspent last year.

Was the template not available to it? Or was it not asked for?

6. What can go wrong

India has a six-year record on exactly this kind of scheme. It is a record of under-deployment.

Across all 14 Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes, six years in: INR 36,754 cr (USD 3.86bn) disbursed against an approved outlay of INR 1.91 lakh cr — 19.2%. (⚠️ The outlay is also published as INR 1.97 lakh cr, giving 18.7%. Print both.)

One sector took half the money. Six of fourteen had received nothing when DPIIT's own Additional Secretary last briefed on it, with disbursement running at INR 4,415 cr against an INR 11,000 cr annual target.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) surrendered INR 1,574 cr of PLI budget in FY2024 and told Parliament that utilisation was "beyond the ministry's control." The Standing Committee called that "not understandable." In March 2025 the government decided not to expand PLI beyond its 14 pilot sectors. The textiles PLI has had its application deadline extended repeatedly because applicants did not come forward.

And the precedent inside this ministry. Khelo India's FY2025-26 allocation was INR 1,000 cr. Actual spending was INR 700 cr — a 30% underspend — and the allocation was then cut to INR 924.35 cr. Its own infrastructure dashboard shows 93 of 425 sanctioned projects at zero per cent progress (see our second story this week).

This scheme is built like the textiles PLI, not the electronics one. Labour-intensive, MSME-heavy, export-oriented, no milestone verification, no small-firm entry tier, no named implementing agency.

Textiles has paid out 3.6% of its money in six years. We fear the same here.

7. In short, and the questions nobody is asking

India has committed USD 194.8m over eight years to an industry that exports USD 187–197m a year. On India's own customs data, those exports have not grown in a decade. The money is routed to investors who can commit INR 100 crore, in a sector that is 79% household units. Its headline physical deliverable — four manufacturing zones — has no money in this scheme and no designated locations. It carries no targets, no milestones, no audit mechanism and no implementing agency. The structural problem its own underpinning report calls 77% of the cost gap was not addressed in the Budget that preceded it. And the comparable scheme in textiles has disbursed 3.6% in six years.

The questions:

1. Nine in ten of this industry is micro or small. The entry price is INR 10 crore. How many of the 25,000 units in Meerut and Jalandhar qualify?
2. Will the ministry publish that number before the first rupee moves?
3. Does the scheme cover footwear and apparel, or not?
4. If it does not, why was the one Indian company capable of anchoring a zone courted at all?
5. A task force was announced in August 2025 to write this policy. Where is its report?
6. Electronics gets milestone tranches and third-party audits. Containers got published jobs targets. Why not sports goods?
7. NITI said INR 7,300 crore of subsidy was unsustainable without fixing input duties, and INR 1,700 crore would do if they were fixed. The Cabinet approved INR 1,857 crore and did not fix the duties. Which scenario is this?
8. Why does DGCI&S say USD 196.75m and NITI say USD 275m?
9. Why does India not publish its own biggest sports equipment export line?
10. If a single cluster turns over this scheme's entire eight-year outlay in one year, what is the money for?