Bihar is on a sports gold rush. Rs 680 cr budget, big-ticket events, hunt for Olympians
Bihar wants to go from sports underdog to medal powerhouse. It’s building stadiums, hiring coaches, and running a talent hunt in 40,000 schools — but it’s still battling decades of dysfunction.
It’s where the “world’s largest sports competition” is unfolding. Under the watchful eye of coaches, it’s all action. Wrestlers lock limbs on the mat. A boy twists mid-air, snapping his leg at a yellow ball in sepak takraw or foot volleyball. On the rugby field, bodies collide and shouts erupt from the sidelines.
Just as Haryana built a medal machine with wrestling, and Jharkhand turned hockey into its stronghold, Bihar is chasing its own breakthrough. But it’s betting on a different approach. Instead of sticking to big-ticket sports like hockey, it’s also throwing its weight behind less-crowded fields like rugby and sepak takraw.
To create this pipeline, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar launched Mashal, a massive statewide talent competition at the Patliputra stadium on 9 December. The state is building stadiums, hiring coaches, and scouting talent. It’s even rewarding medals with jobs.
“Bihar is back,” IPS officer Raveendran Sankaran, the director general of the Bihar State Sports Authority (BSSA), told ThePrint. “By the end of our talent drive, we will have a pool of 5,000 to 6,000 players under 14 and 16 years of age. We are going to train this talent for our mission 2032-36 Olympics.”
The BSSA’s budget has leapt from Rs 30 crore in 2022 to Rs 680 crore in 2024, and in January, Bihar created a standalone Sports Department—earlier under Art and Culture— to fast-track infrastructure and schemes for athletes.
But money alone can’t scrub away decades of dysfunction. Bihar’s sports system has long been marred by corruption, crumbling infrastructure, and a shortage of trained coaches. This is why the government is banking majorly on talent to cut through the mess. And where players once had to scrounge, they now receive ready support.
“We would beg officials to get us one pair of sporting shorts, and travel on unconfirmed train tickets,” recalled Dr Karunesh Kumar, a former national sepak takraw player and now a sports officer at IIT Patna. “But now, if a sportsperson is missing equipment, the state’s agencies would even fly that equipment out. That shows how serious the sports authority is