Despite Pumping In Money To Revive Indian Hockey, The Game Is Confined To One District In Odisha

The accolades have been pouring in from all over the country. And why not? After all, before Odisha did it, no one else had thought that a state government could sponsor a national sporting team. When the Naveen Patnaik government stepped in to sponsor the Indian hockey team for the next five years after former sponsor Sahara backed out in 2018, it was justifiably hailed for thinking out of box and doing something that had been the preserve of corporate entities.

After the Indian men’s team won the bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics—the first podium finish in 41 years—captain Manpreet Singh was effusive in his praise for the Odisha chief minister. “This dream won’t be possible without the encouragement & vision of Hon’ble Chief Minister of Odisha Shri Naveen Patnaik ji, who has been supporting us throughout this journey…,” Manpreet tweeted.

Sponsorship of the Indian team, however, is only a part of the Odisha government’s approach in promoting hockey. The metamorphosis of the once sleepy Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar into a hockey arena of international standards has been a major achievement. With the required infrastructure in place, it has emerged as the favoured venue for top international hockey tournaments like the FIH World Cup (2018), the Champions Trophy (2014) and the FIH World League (2019). Having successfully hosted the 2018 World Cup, Bhuba­neswar has earned the rare distinction of being named the venue for the marquee tournament for the second successive time in 2023. With the 2023 event in mind, the Odisha government is building the biggest hockey stadium in India: the Birsa Munda stadium, with a seating capacity of 20, 000, in the steel city of Rourkela, which is co-hosting the event.

Rourkela is at the heart of the predominantly tribal Sundargarh district, the cradle of hockey in Odisha that has produced a long line of former international players like Dillip Tirkey, Lazarus Barla, Ignace Tirkey and Prabodh Tirkey and members of the current national team Birendra Lakra and Amit Rohidas. The district has also ensured a steady supply of players to the Indian women’s team—Jyoti Sunita Kullu, Lilima Minz, Sunita Lakra, Mariana Kujur, Namita Toppo and Deep Grace Ekka, who excelled as a defender at the Tokyo Olympics. Hockey is a way of life for thousands of tribal children here. The ‘khasi’ tournaments—where the winner takes a goat instead of a trophy—held in Sundargarh’s villages generate tremendous enthusiasm.

But while the district has two hockey-­only sports hostels in Sund­ar­garh and Rourkela, there is little hockey infrastructure in interior areas from where the majority of hockey talent emerges. In rough, dust-laden countryside maidans, many players do not even have proper sticks. All that is set to change. The Naveen Patnaik government will ensure that each of Sundargarh’s 17 blocks has an astro-turf in place ahead of the 2023 World Cup for budding players to practise on. Sundargarh is finally getting what it deserved all along.

That is not all. The government has drawn up a blueprint to provide the best coaching facilities to emerging players. “To enable young hockey players to practise on astro-turf at an early age, the state is constructing 20 hockey training centres at a cost of Rs 200 crore. A professional coaching programme at the grassroots will ensure that a large number of children take up hockey as a career,” says Sports Secretary R. Vineel Krishna. Besides, a ‘high performance centre’ in partnership with the Tata Group has been operational at Kalinga Stadium for the last two years.

These commendable efforts certainly promise a bright future for the game. But have they made any real difference to the state of hockey in Odisha? “Not really,” says senior sports journalist Sambit Mohapatra. “Hockey is still largely confined to Sundargarh district. Forget other places. Hockey is not played in any school in Bhubaneswar except the KISS school for tribals—this even after it hosted top events like the Champions Trophy and the World Cup. People have come and watched the matches. But if they don’t lead to more children playing the game with active encouragement from their parents, what difference have they made?” he asks.

Mohapatra’s views are echoed by Ashok Mohanty, retired assistant director of sports and a former hockey pla­yer. “Normally, organisation of a big international sporting event leads to the spread of the game in the area. But that hasn’t happened for hockey in Odi­sha. There has been no real effort to take the game beyond Sundargarh,” he says.

While commending the state government for the creation of infrastructure and organisation of major tournaments, Pratap Satpathy, secretary of Hockey Odisha, is not ready to accept that it has resurrected the game in Odisha. “Odisha was a hockey powerhouse long before the government stepped in. It has been in the top two in the country in junior and sub-junior tournaments for over a decade now. But they haven’t gone on to play for the country at the senior level because of the step-motherly attitude of Hockey India. There was a time not long ago when there were four or five players from Odisha in the Indian team. K.P.S. Gill, former president of Indian Hockey Federation, used to say that an Indian team cannot be thought of without Odisha. And look, how many players in the current Indian teams are from Odisha?” he points out.

In a clear sign that all is not well with hockey in Odisha, Hockey India has withdrawn affiliation of Hockey Odisha on the ground that it has not followed norms. An ad hoc committee has been set up to run the game in the state. Hockey Odisha has challenged the ad hoc panel in the court and the matter is sub judice.

Hockey insiders believe that the Naval Tata high performance centre set up in Kalinga Stadium wasn’t a bright idea. “These are players groomed in the sports hostels set up by the government. What we have done in effect is hand over finished products (players) to the Tatas to work with, and for a hefty fee at that. Ideally, they should have scouted for talented players from the grassroots and given them the required training. But that is not what is happening,” says one of them.

At a time when everyone is singing paeans to the Odisha government for what it has done for hockey, these naysayers may stick out like a sore thumb. Their comments may sound like caustic nitpicking. But the government would do well to pay heed and make course corrections wherever warranted, so that the interest our natio­nal game has generated in the wake of the Indian teams’ praiseworthy performance at the Tokyo Olympics leads to greater success. 

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Transparency, The Missing Goal

The Naveen Patnaik government in Odisha swears by transparency as an integral part of its ‘5T’ mantra for administration. But when it comes to extending this cardinal principle to the expenditure incurred for ‘promotion’ of hockey, it has chosen to be stubbornly opaque. Repeated queries under the RTI have failed to elicit a comprehensive account of money spent on this score. More than two-and-a-half years after Bhubaneswar hosted the Hockey World Cup, no one knows for sure how much was spent on the organisation of the event.

“At the time of the Hockey World Cup in 2018, the government had gone to town claiming that it did not pay a rupee to rope in Bollywood stars Shahrukkh Khan and Salman Khan. What it did not tell us was that the money was paid by cash-rich PSU Odisha Mining Corporation (OMC) to Hockey India, which in turn paid a handsome amount to these stars. When we sought a detailed statement from HI on how it had spent the Rs 70 crores paid by OMC, it refused to part with the information, saying it was confidential. There is no transparency at all,” says leading RTI act­ivist and convenor of Odisha Soochana Adhikar Abhiyan, Pradip Pradhan.

(This appeared in the print edition as "A Push In Dribbles")