India Switched On the Money and Left the Regulator Switched Off
On Friday the Sports Ministry told federations they can claim up to USD 5.7 million (INR 50 crore) to host an international event — twenty-five times the old ceiling. The statutory board meant to police those federations has no chairperson, no members, and no powers.
On Friday the government raised the grant a sports federation can claim to host an international event. The old ceiling was USD 227,000 (INR 2 crore). The new one is USD 5.7 million (INR 50 crore).
The body created to supervise those federations does not exist. Fifteen months after Parliament passed the law, nobody has been appointed to it. And the clause that would give it any powers has never been brought into force.
India has finished building the machinery that writes the cheques, and left the machinery that checks them in a drawer.
What the government did on Friday
The Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports published the operating rules for the money India will spend on its sports federations for the rest of the decade.
The scheme carries USD 839 million (INR 7,386.74 crore) and runs to 2030-31. The Cabinet approved that money on 31 July. What arrived on 16 October was the instruction manual.
One line in the manual matters more than the rest. It is the grant a federation can claim for staging an international event in India.
| What a federation wants to host | Maximum grant |
|---|---|
| An event in a sport where India has medalled or finished in the world's top ten | USD 5.7m (INR 50 crore) |
| The National Games | USD 5.7m (INR 50 crore) |
| An event in a sport where India is in the world's top sixteen | USD 2.3m (INR 20 crore) |
| A world championship in an indigenous Indian sport | USD 2.3m (INR 20 crore) |
| An Asian Championship held in India | USD 341,000 (INR 3 crore) |
| The maximum for any of these, until 16 October | USD 227,000 (INR 2 crore) |
Read the table and the policy is obvious. This is not a grant scheme. It is a bid-support programme.
Ahmedabad already has the 2030 Commonwealth Games. India is one of seven countries in the IOC's continuous dialogue for the 2036 Olympics. The guidelines are the machinery for putting international events on Indian soil between now and then.
Who decides which federation gets the USD 5.7 million (INR 50 crore)? A committee headed by the Secretary (Sports). The guidelines say that committee "will decide its own methods and procedures for evaluating the requests from NSFs."
The regulator India legislated and never switched on
It is the regulator created by the National Sports Governance Act, 2025. Three people — a chairperson and two members.
Its job list is short and serious. Recognise national sports federations. Suspend them. Investigate how they treat athletes and how they spend public money. Put an administrator into a federation that has stopped working. Write India's Safe Sports Policy.
Everything in that list sits in one clause of the Act: Section 6.
Section 6 has never been notified.
Parliament passed the Act in August 2025. The government has brought it into force in pieces — one set of provisions on 1 January 2026, a second on 12 May 2026. Section 6 was in neither. Nor were the clauses covering recognition, suspension, athlete-welfare inquiries, administrators and the Safe Sports Policy.
So India does not simply lack a regulator. It lacks the paragraph that would tell a regulator what to do.
| Provision of the 2025 Act | What it does | In force? |
|---|---|---|
| Sections 4, 5, 14, 15 | Constitutes the Board, the Sports Tribunal, the election panel | Yes — 1 Jan 2026 |
| Sections 7, 18, 19, 21 | Further machinery provisions | Yes — 12 May 2026 |
| Section 6 | All ten of the Board's powers | No |
| Sections 8 and 10 | Recognising, suspending and cancelling federations | No |
| Section 9 | Inquiries into athlete welfare and misuse of public funds | No |
| Section 13 | India's Safe Sports Policy | No |
The appointments have not happened either. The rules fixing the Board at three people were notified in late May. A search committee headed by the Cabinet Secretary was set up to recommend names. In July the Ministry extended the application deadline by fifteen days and said formation "will take some more time." Nothing has been announced since.
What fills the gap
The Sports Ministry suspends the Table Tennis Federation of India for failing to hold elections. It does so under the National Sports Development Code of 2011 — the old administrative rulebook the 2025 Act was written to replace.
The Ministry notifies a 20-member national election panel. The Act says the Board must maintain that list. The Board does not exist, so the notification has to be issued under a specially written Removal of Difficulties Order, 2026.
The international equestrian federation, sitting in Lausanne, suspends the Equestrian Federation of India over a governance crisis and a failure to hold elections. It takes effect on 1 December.
The Delhi High Court takes up the table tennis suspension. Justice Amit Mahajan records that he is “prima facie satisfied that the impugned order is arbitrary”. He grants no stay. Next hearing: 6 November.
The same day, the Ministry publishes the funding guidelines.
An international federation in Switzerland can suspend an Indian national federation. India's own statutory regulator cannot, because its powers have not been notified.
And the only enforcement tool the Ministry has left is a 2011 code that a High Court has now called arbitrary in its application.
The receipt from the last cycle
There is a second number worth putting beside that USD 839 million (INR 7,387 crore). It is what the previous cycle actually bought.
One narrower figure emerged on 13 October, and it is the sharper one. USD 3.1 million (INR 27.16 crore) went to 34 elite athletes in the Target Olympic Podium Scheme, across nine sports, who won nothing.
Nobody in the Indian system publishes a cost per medal, a per-sport split, or a target against which any of this could be judged. We had to do the division ourselves.
Who gains
- Federations with hosting ambitions. A 25x ceiling, and a committee that sets its own rules for awarding it.
- The 2036 bid. Events on Indian soil are the strongest evidence a bidder can show. This is the budget line that buys them.
- Indigenous sports. Kabaddi, kho kho and mallakhamb federations get world-championship funding for the first time.
- Sitting federation officials. The power to remove them is the part of the Act that has not been switched on.
Who is exposed
- Athletes in failing federations. Every athlete-protection clause sits in the un-notified set.
- The Ministry's own legal position. Enforcing through a 2011 code a court has called arbitrary invites more litigation, not less.
- The National Sports Board itself. A regulator that arrives after the money is committed inherits decisions it never reviewed.
- Smaller federations. Discretionary grants reward the ability to write a good proposal, which the well-staffed bodies already have.
The money is defensible. India underfunds its federations. The old hosting ceiling of USD 227,000 was too low to stage anything serious. Building officials, technical capacity and domestic competition is real work, and someone has to pay for it.
The sequencing is not defensible. A government that spent two years arguing a statutory regulator was urgently needed has now opened a five-year funding cycle without one. That is not a delay in paperwork. It is a decision about what comes first.
Our position: Section 6 should have been notified before the guidelines were published, and the USD 5.7 million hosting grant should sit against published criteria rather than a committee that writes its own.
The question for Indian sport
We keep being told that 2036 is the goal. Take that seriously for a moment.
A country that hosts an Olympic Games is not judged on its stadiums. It is judged on whether its federations can run a competition, protect a minor, publish an account and hold an election on time.
Those four things are exactly what the National Sports Board was created to enforce. They are also exactly what has not been switched on.
So we have arrived somewhere strange. India has the most ambitious sports funding programme in its history. It has a world-class line item for bringing events here. And it has a regulator that exists only as a gazette notification with its powers clause missing.
When a federation collapses this winter, the Ministry will reach for a code from 2011 that a High Court has already called arbitrary. When an athlete is harmed, there will be no Safe Sports Policy to invoke, because Section 13 is not in force.
None of this is hard to fix. It needs one notification and three appointments.
So here is the question. If the National Sports Board is not needed to supervise the largest sports spending commitment India has ever made, what exactly was it for?
And if it is needed — what is a government doing writing the cheques first?
Whether Section 6 is notified, and a chairperson named, before the first USD 5.7 million (INR 50 crore) hosting grant is sanctioned. The Delhi High Court returns to the table tennis suspension on 6 November. The equestrian suspension takes effect on 1 December. If both dates pass with the Board still unformed, the 2011 code will be doing all the work in Indian sports governance for a second winter.