India’s talent hunt must look beyond the Olympics

Every August 29, the country pauses on Major Dhyan Chand’s birth anniversary, hands out its highest sporting honours, and tells itself that talent must be found and looked after. It seems a good day for a parent to say something out loud.

A fortnight ago, from the Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the thing few leaders say about their own country. There are roughly 40 sports and some 350 events at the Olympic Games, and India does not play or qualify in nearly two-thirds of them. So a talent hunt will now go into every village, every city and every school to find children between five and fifteen, train them properly, and prepare them for the Games of 2036.

It takes honesty to admit that, and he is right about the fix. For too long we have gone to the Olympics to see how a handful of our best fare rather than to compete across the field. Finding children early and staying with them for a decade is the only method that has ever worked anywhere.

I want to place one thought alongside that ambition, as a parent rather than as an expert. Some of India’s most capable young athletes compete in sports that are not on the Olympic list at all. Motorsport is one of them. There is no karting event at the Games, no Formula car, no chequered flag in the closing ceremony. So when the nets are cast for 2036, a certain kind of child will simply not be caught in them, no matter how good she is or who she has already beaten.

I know this because I am raising one.

My daughter Arshi is nine. In only her second year of competitive racing she won the Indian National Karting Championship 2025 in the Micro Max category, the youngest ever to do so in this country, among boys and girls both. She is today the only female national-level karting champion in Asia, and the youngest driver in the world selected for the F1 Academy Discover Your Drive Programme. In June she received the FIA President’s Medal from the FMSCI, and she has stood on an international podium in the UK and UAE.

I set these down only because they are the sort of facts that would ordinarily place a child inside a national programme.

One thing about karting deserves to be said plainly. It is a mixed-gender sport. Girls and boys race the same karts, on the same circuit, at the same speeds, and the timing screen does not know the difference. Whatever my daughter has won, she has won against boys. In a country still working out how to get girls onto playing fields at all, that is not a small thing.

What it costs is the part nobody sees. A racing kart is not a bat or a pair of spikes. There are engines, tyres, spares, entry fees, a mechanic, a coach, testing days, and flights to England or Dubai, because the racing that develops a driver is not all available here. We have carried most of this ourselves and been fortunate to be able to. I think often about the children who have her aptitude and none of that cushion. Their talent will not announce itself. Somebody has to go and look.

That is precisely what the Prime Minister has promised to do. My submission is only that the search be defined more generously than the Olympic programme defines it.

India has never had a driver stand on a Formula 1 podium. Two Indians have raced in the sport, a few have reached Formula 2, and we built a world-class circuit outside Delhi and then let the race go. Motorsport remains one of the most watched sporting properties on earth, followed in exactly the markets where this government wants Indian excellence to register. A tricolour on an F1 podium would do for India’s standing abroad what a great many campaigns cannot.

None of this needs a new ministry. It needs non-Olympic disciplines written into the talent hunt’s terms of reference rather than left out, and a funding window a child already on a recognised international pathway can actually apply to. It also needs Indian industry, which the Prime Minister rightly asked to think globally, to see that backing a young driver is not charity but one of the cheapest routes an Indian brand has to a global audience.

My daughter will keep racing either way. We will keep finding the money and she will keep getting into the kart, because at nine she has already decided what she wants. But whether India has a racing champion within the decade, and whether that champion is a girl, is not really up to her.

Dhyan Chand was not made by a scheme. He was made by a country in which his game was everywhere he looked, so that a boy with an unreasonable gift could not go unnoticed. That is the real work of a talent hunt, and it is why the net has to be cast wider than a list of events.

The rest of it is up to us.

Deepti Gupta is the mother of Arshi Gupta, India’s youngest-ever national karting champion; Views presented are personal.