At simply 12, Misti Karmakar’s days started earlier than daybreak. By 3.30 am, she was on her bike, pedalling 4 km by means of the silent streets of West Bengal’s Malda, a javelin in tow, to put in writing her story within the morning sky.
Elevating an athlete daughter was a battle for Sanjay Karmakar, a hawker on the Malda railway station. On a very good day, he would earn Rs 500; simply sufficient to feed the household and hold hope flickering. However when it got here to Misti’s future, there could be no compromise.
“She comes from a really modest background however is wealthy in expertise,” says Misti’s coach Asit Pal. A former 400m runner, Pal noticed Misti in the course of the pandemic lockdown and satisfied Sanjay to let him coach his daughter freed from price. “And I made him a promise — to make Misti an ‘India’ athlete,” Pal says. “Like Neeraj Chopra.”
On the face of it, it is a typical Indian sport story. However Misti, now 16, has emerged as one of many faces of a storm brewing in Indian sport.
An evaluation by The Indian Specific of participation developments since 2019 in a number of the main sports activities revealed that when champions rise, a wave unfurls. There was a multifold spike within the participation numbers — pushed by girls athletes — from 2019 to 2025, noticeably in disciplines the place Indians have emerged as world beaters.
The true impression of India’s Olympic and World Championship medals is seen past the rostrum, throughout the nation’s sprawling geography. From a badminton dream nurtured inside a no-frills academy to a budding javelin thrower from the atolls of Lakshadweep to a taking pictures prodigy from a chemical cluster in Gujarat.
Contemplate the next knowledge:
- The participation within the Nationwide Javelin Day, to commemorate Neeraj’s Tokyo Olympics gold medal in 2021, has grown sevenfold in simply three years — from 700 in 2022 to 4,974 in 2025.
- Within the javelin competitors on the junior nationwide championships, there was a 90% development (75 in 2023 to 143 in 2024) amongst males and a staggering 125% amongst girls (61 in 2023, 137 in 2024).
- The spike is extra pronounced in taking pictures, the one different sport the place India has gained a person gold medal after Independence — Abhinav Bindra’s historic feat on the Beijing Video games in 2008. From 8,011 individuals on the Nationwide Championships within the pre-pandemic yr of 2019, the quantity surged greater than 100% to 16,951 within the ongoing 2025 version.
The expansion is most seen within the air rifle and air pistol occasions, the place India has amassed Olympic, World Championships and World Cup medals — from 3,825 air pistol rivals on the Nationwide Championships in 2019 to six,703 in 2024; and in air rifle, up from 2,817 in 2019 to 4,835 in 2024.
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Impressed by Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty’s pathbreaking outcomes, India’s premier junior rating badminton match, the Krishna Khaitan Memorial, has witnessed a 100% enhance within the U-19 males’s doubles; from 104 in 2012 to 208 in 2022. Equally, on the Rajasthan State Rating match, the entries went up from 517 in 2022 to 893 final yr, a 70% enhance.
Speaking of how massive medals increase participation numbers, Lalit Bhanot, the chairman of the Athletics Federation of India’s Planning Fee, offers the instance of javelin. Kashinath Naik’s bronze medal on the 2010 Commonwealth Video games in New Delhi, he instructed The Indian Specific, confirmed “there was javelin expertise in India… (Neeraj) Chopra, after all, actually boosted the recognition of javelin by changing into the Olympic gold medallist and that may be seen within the rising variety of athletes who throw over 80 metres.”
In males’s javelin, 80 m is taken into account an elite efficiency threshold. In 2023, two years after Chopra’s Olympic gold, India had six throwers who crossed that mark – the identical as Finland, seen because the occasion’s powerhouse. At September’s World Championships, India had 4 javelin throwers, greater than every other nation.
Girls athletes drive development
The expansion in numbers has been pushed by the elevated participation of ladies athletes.
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Two years in the past, a analysis by The Indian Specific of India’s Asian Video games contingent revealed that the female-male proportion ratio among the many medal winners was 43:57. It pointed to a shrinking gender hole in terms of sporting success. 20 years in the past, the ratio was roughly 36:64 and within the 2018 version, it stood at roughly 40:60.
This development is seen on the nationwide stage, too.
From 2019 to 2024, the participation of ladies in junior nationwide javelin championships skyrocketed from 31 to 137, a staggering 125% spike. Among the many seniors, girls’s javelin throw has recorded a 70% enhance in participation on the inter-state match, whereas the lads’s numbers remained steady.
Whereas girls’s participation in taking pictures remains to be nearly 46% lower than males, it’s quickly catching up and rising sooner in most occasions. That is evident from the 111% rise in 10 m air pistol — from 1,033 in 2019 to 2,181 final yr — and nearly 90% enhance in 10 m air rifle, from 1,075 in 2019 to 2,038 in 2024.
In weightlifting, too, there was a rise in girls’s numbers throughout all classes. “My commentary is girls are extra disciplined and pushed,” says nationwide weightlifting coach Vijay Sharma, who has been in Mirabai Chanu’s nook for the final decade. “When you might have extra to show and higher will-power, the possibilities of you succeeding enhance routinely.”
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The surge in girls’s participation is clear even past the disciplines recognized by the sports activities ministry as a excessive precedence. As an illustration, in keeping with the All India Soccer Federation, the variety of girls gamers has grown from 8,683 throughout 2016 to 2020 to 37,829 from 2022 to 2025. The launch of a girls’s league in 2016, the emergence of gamers corresponding to Manisha Kalyan, the primary Indian to have performed within the UEFA Champions League for ladies, and occasional eye-catching outcomes, resulting in the nationwide crew qualifying for the 2026 Asian Cup — first time in 23 years — are seen as the explanations for this surge.
Purple flags in archery, wrestling
The evaluation additionally introduced some pink flags.
In archery, as an example, the numbers in senior males’s participation on the nationwide championship have been declining year-on-year, and the unfold of the game isn’t as large as athletics, badminton or taking pictures — 65% of the archers are from half-a-dozen states in western and northern India.
The larger fear, nevertheless, is in wrestling, the one sport the place India has gained a medal in every of the final 5 Olympics. The game, thrown into turmoil following the allegations of sexual harassment in opposition to its former president, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, has witnessed a steep fall in participation numbers on the Nationwide Championships. In males’s freestyle, as an example, there have been 284 entries on the 2019 Nationwide Championships. That quantity fell to 190 in 2023, when the protests in opposition to Brij Bhushan started, and slumped additional to 136 final yr. Equally, in girls’s wrestling, the entries fell from 234 in 2019 to 94 in 2023 and a marginal enhance of 124 in 2024. In Greco-Roman model, too, the numbers dropped from 264 in 2019 to 133 in 2024.
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A Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) official stated this occurred due to “inner issues”. On the Nationwide Championships earlier this month in Ahmedabad, the overall variety of individuals in males’s freestyle, Greco-Roman and ladies’s freestyle classes have been ‘roughly 750’ — the identical as pre-Covid and pre-protests years.
The federation official says, “We had two Nationwide Championships within the aftermath of the protests, one held by the WFI, which wasn’t recognised by the federal government, and one other by the ad-hoc physique which the Indian Olympic Affiliation fashioned. Due to that, the participation numbers fell sharply. This yr, we have been again to regular since most of our inner points are sorted.”