In terms of the sports employment market, India faces a peculiar problem. On one side, there is a huge demand for sports experts, on the other side, the experts are not getting jobs in the market. This raises an understanding of issues related to quality and type of experts we need. This is one of the reasons that inspite of numerous so-called experts, the government of India and sports federations have hired many coaches and experts from abroad instead of from within India. And the kind of money we have been paying to them is almost 8 to 10 times more than the Indian coaches and other domain specialists.
According to various studies, India needs around 50 lacs / 5 million sports experts in coming years to take care of the demand of the sporting and recreation market. This cannot be achieved only by existing institutions and systems.
Across India, the total number of experts produced in ayear are not more than 60,000. To fill the demand and supply gap, we need to augment both institutions and new courses.
Under the Skill India movement of the Government of India, Sports Sector Skill Council called Sports, Physical Education, Fitness and Leisure Council (SPEFL) was set up but even after so many years of working, no new courses have been added to cater to the growing demand. There seems to be also issues related to scale, quality and type of courses created by the Skills Council. Unfortunately, only very few courses out of about 55 different proposed courses have seen the light of the day.
Hence, CSRI is committed to promote skills development by supporting, helping and raising the issues of various organisations engaged in coaching and skill development. It is also necessary that we must adopt a robust system to produce quality experts. CSRI also believes that the sector skill Council, whose main job is to do capacity building and skill development needs to be reorganised with the right knowledge and resources. which cannot be possible without proactive action of both the Ministry of Skills Development and Entrepreneurship and MYAS. The Sector Skill Council has also to understand that without the proper support from the sports federation, skills development from the grassroot level to an elite sportsperson cannot be achieved.