Every Indian is taking pride these days in celebrating the victory moments of India in the ongoing Tokyo Olympic 2021. This is the glory sports can bring to a country. But is our country doing the necessary to give sport the importance it deserves?

I guess the answer is No. In India sports have always been a second, third or fourth option. Its 2021 and still not much difference can be seen in the approach towards sports as a career or sports as a part of education.

Starting from the early period of life, a child is taught that academic excellence is the only thing that matters. The extracurricular activities in school also focuses only on cultural development like music, dancing or painting with very little or no specific importance to sports. 

A child, who is greatly inclined towards sports and its associated activities but slightly poor in his academic career, is never treated equal in class as compared to a child with good academic background , no matter how good the former might be at sports.

Parents these days barely allow their child to spend their time in games and sports, and prefer investing those time in studies. Even there are several online apps and websites which focuses only on the academic growth where as no such app exist for the development of sports. If we consider the periodic Timetable of a class we can see only one period per week is allocated to sports. 

Apart from that some other factors which are responsible for poor development of sports in India are - 

• Poverty- Poverty being so widespread in India many families cannot provide their children with the necessary equipments and facilities to go ahead and persue a career in sports.
• Lack of infrastructure - The grassroot level problem lies in the fact that there are no proper infrastructure for sports in schools and colleges. Hence the growth years of kids are spent without much exposure to sports.

I, as a citizen of India, deserve more importance and better opportunities. Just celebrating the victory doesn't make us a sports fan. We must encourage our next generation to take part in sports and the Government must see to it to provide better scope for those who choose sports.

M S Dhoni wouldn't be what he is today had he not left his job to give all he had to Cricket.

Moreover in India when talking about sports, the only sport talked about is Cricket. It is now time all other forms of sports like Tennis, Badminton, Shotput, Archery etc are also taken equally seriously.