National c'ships: Time to rethink institutional presence

National champion Arvind Bhat

The National Badminton Championships, which includes the team and the individual open events, will begin in Bangalore on Tuesday. For the next week, a gathering of the country’s badminton elite – players, officials, support staff, fans, etc – will set up camp in Bangalore, at the end of which the best of the best will be crowned champions.

While there is much excitement, understandably, of who the eventual singles champions will be, there is next to no curiosity about the team event. That’s no surprise, for we can well declare the winners even before the event starts: Petroleum Sports Promotion Board (PSPB), which is a line-up of the country’s international team. The inevitability of the result is a comment on a strange practice in our conduct of national events.

PSPB, which is an ‘institutional’ team, has been allowed to compete in the inter-state team event. (PSPB consists of all the teams of state-owned petroleum companies, such as Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum, Hindustan Petroleum, etc., which employs all of India’s top players.) Other institutional teams in the fray are Airports Authority of India and Air India. This practice has robbed the inter-state event of competitiveness, as the corporate teams, employing India’s best players, will steamroll the opposition.

The question now is: why should an ‘institutional’ team participate in an inter-state event? Shouldn’t Saina Nehwal, for instance, be representing Andhra instead of PSPB? Consider the PSPB team: it includes Arvind Bhat, V Diju, Ajay Jayaram, Saurabh Verma, Sai Praneeth, Pranav Chopra, Guru Sai Dutt, Chetan Anand, Tarun Kona and Rupesh Kumar in the men’s team and Saina Nehwal, Aditi Mutatkar, Sindhu PV, Aparna Balan, Trupti Murgunde, Gayatri Vartak, Nitya Sosale and Prajakta Sawant in the women. Essentially, the best players from across the country are made to represent one team. Had they, instead, represented their individual states, the inter-state competition would have been much keener and attracted greater interest.

Vimal Kumar, Tournament Director of the National Championships, acknowledges that this has been a long-standing problem. “We’be been raising this issue since 1997,” he says. “But the BAI has never wanted to change it. They say preventing the corporates from the inter-state event will discourage them, but I don’t see why this is a problem. The players can represent their insitutions once the open championships begin, because their companies give them their bread and butter. Allowing companies to field teams in the inter-state championship robs it of competitiveness, as everybody knows who the eventual winners will be. Earlier, Railways and Services fielded the country’s top players because they were the only employers of sportspeople. After the petroleum companies started recruiting badminton players, they have dominated the inter-state event.”

This is not to say corporates shouldn’t field teams, but there is a case for the BAI to promote a separate inter-corporate championship. An event of this sort can build a huge corporate presence, perhaps even inviting IT majors to field teams. An inter-state event at the national championships should not be the stage for corporate teams to roll over the opposition.