-Shreshtha Kumar,  B.A. LL.B. Student and Legal & Public Policy Researcher, New Delhi

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From the Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on this Independence Day, announced India’s aspiration to host the 2036 Olympic Games, accompanied by a call to widen the country’s sporting horizon through early talent identification. The emphasis on identifying talent in disciplines in which India has historically remained underrepresented signals an ambition that extends beyond adding to the existing medal tally, it seeks to alter the country’s sporting landscape itself.

But an ambition of this scale raises a consequential question: what happens after the talent is found?

India is not starting from a blank slate. The Khelo India Movement, launched in 2017, was meant to build a grassroots sporting ecosystem- identifying talent, developing athletes, improving infrastructure and creating competitive opportunities. But scale alone cannot tell us whether the pipeline is working. The key question is whether a child identified at the grassroots can be traced through the stages that produce an elite athlete.

There are encouraging signs. At the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, 124 Khelo India Athletes (KIAs) were part of India's contingent and contributed 42 of the country's 106 medals. At Paris 2024, 28 KIAs were part of India's 117-member Olympic contingent. Government data also indicates that 138 Khelo India Athletes have subsequently progressed to the Target Olympic Podium Scheme(TOPS). These numbers show that India has built parts of a pathway capable of producing international-level athletes. But they do not tell us how efficiently athletes move through it.

India knows how many athletes it identifies and increasingly how many it supports. But what remains less visible is the journey between identification and elite sport: how many continue, reach State and senior national teams, compete at World Championships, and where the pipeline loses them.

Identification is only the beginning

The first danger is to mistake identification for development. Finding a promising 10-year-old is only the beginning. Physical attributes at that age do not automatically translate into elite performance. The athlete needs competent coaching, competition, sports science, nutrition, medical support and an educational environment that allows sport and schooling to coexist. The real test, therefore, is not how many children India discovers, but how many it can retain, develop and graduate into high-performance sport.

A Parliamentary Standing Committee examining Khelo India found that, in 2018-19, only 625 of 1,518 athletes selected for training joined accredited academies, while 893 dropped out. The Committee linked this largely to the absence of integrated education and recommended residential-cum-educational facilities. The government has since taken measures in this direction, but it remains insufficient for a talent pool of this scale.  For a child identified early, sport is also a decision about education, family, mobility and livelihood. If the system forces a choice between education and sport, it risks losing the very talent it identified.

The same Parliamentary scrutiny points to another constraint: capacity. It found 544 vacancies against 1,524 sanctioned coaching posts, while a 2025 review found around 45% of sanctioned posts in the Sports Authority of India vacant. The challenge, therefore, is not only finding talent in remote districts, but having enough trained coaches and functional institutions to develop it.

Finding the right athlete for the right sport

The 2025 Parliamentary review also goes beyond infrastructure. It asks India to identify sports with untapped medal potential and recommends targeted identification of children aged 10 to 15. It also recommends recognising sporting associations in disciplines that could produce international medals. This aligns with the Prime Minister’s emphasis on disciplines where India has historically had little presence. The policy conversation is therefore shifting from “find more athletes” to “find athletes for the right sports.” If India wants a much larger Olympic medal haul, it cannot keep relying on the same sporting specialisations and expect a very different result.

Other countries have recognised the gap between discovery and excellence earlier. Australia’s Foundations-Talent-Elite-Mastery (FTEM) framework treats sporting development as a continuum linking identification with coaching, education and high-performance institutions. Japan’s Japan Rising Star Project and World-class Pathway Network similarly connect regional identification with athlete development, including the possibility of transferring athletes to sports better suited to their physical attributes. India need not replicate either system. The lesson is simpler: talent identification should be a pathway, not an event.

Making selection transparent

Another concern is how India selects talent in the first place. The Khelo India identification process is complex and lengthy, involving multiple trials and assessment stages. The repeated testing could create scope for favouritism and regionalism and requires a single-window selection process. The concern is not that India lacks a mechanism, but whether it can be applied consistently and transparently at the scale now being planned. Standardised assessments, transparent criteria and auditable digital records could make the process more credible.

The Khelo India Rising Talent Identification (KIRTI) initiative, launched in 2024, offers a useful starting point. It uses Talent Assessment Centres, standardised tests and digital tools, including AI and data analytics, to identify children aged 9 to 18. The next step is to turn this assessment architecture into a longitudinal system. If a child is identified through KIRTI, the system should show what happens next: whether the athlete continues training, enters a State or national programme, changes sports or eventually reaches schemes such as TOPS. The objective should be to build a record of the athlete’s journey, not merely a database of those identified.

The information should also improve the system itself. If certain physical profiles repeatedly succeed in one sport but struggle in another, or athletes from particular regions drop out at higher rates, that should shape the next round of identification. If athletes are lost because of inadequate coaching, facilities or competition, the response should not simply be to find more children. The data should show policymakers where the pipeline is failing. Talent identification should become a system that learns from its outcomes, not a one-time exercise in selection.

From talent hunt to talent pipeline

The scale of the ambition makes this accountability indispensable. India is not short of young people or sporting enthusiasm, nor is it without a talent-identification architecture. Khelo India, KIRTI, TOPS and the wider high-performance system already provide important pieces. The opportunity now is to connect them into a system where discovery leads to development, development to competition, and competition to international excellence.

The 2036 Olympic ambition should ultimately be judged not by how many children India finds in the first year, but by how many of those children are still standing at the end of the pathway. The real talent hunt begins after the talent is found.