Five ring masters: Bibek Debroy

August 23, 2008: The Indian Express
 
 Winter Olympics are still irrelevant for India, though there has been sporadic participation since 1968. For Summer Olympics, India’s medal tally is typically binary — 0 or 1. For an exception, one needs to go back to 1952, if not 1900. Hence, 2008 is extraordinary. There are econometric models that seek to explain performance in Olympics that distil performance down to five factors — population, per capita income, past performance, climate and a host effect, with the last especially pronounced for gold medals. Between 1960 and 1992, there was an additional trigger in communist countries like the Soviet Union and GDR.

Obviously, no single variable alone provides the answer. Had population been the only determinant, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria would have performed better. Had per capita income been the only determinant, Luxembourg, Ireland and Iceland would have performed better. One can’t influence past performance and host effect won’t materialise for India before 2020, if at all.

However, India’s per capita income is increasing. Has India therefore moved away from a 0/1 trend to a 2/3 trend? Assorted models suggest there is a threshold of US $ 1000 per capita income one has to cross first, since the relationship between the medal tally and income isn’t linear and proportional.

India is close to the threshold, but hasn’t crossed it yet. By that token, India should break into a 3-plus trajectory beyond 2012 and 6-plus trajectory beyond 2020. (A PwC report predicted 6 in Beijing.) The catch is that winning a medal isn’t an absolute goal. It’s a relative target in the sense that it’s a function of what other countries achieve. A medal win is at the expense of some other country. Witness the relative US decline vis-à-vis China. Per capita income is correlated with lots of things: better education and health indicators, better physical infrastructure, access to global competition. In addition, it frees up resources that become available for developing athletes. In a simple inter-regional sense, one isn’t likely to get world-class athletes from Bihar, Orissa, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh. Largesse is now being showered on Abhinav Bindra, Sushil Kumar and Vijender. One doesn’t grudge them their largesse, but in one sense this isn’t really the point. There is a similarity with what Nobel Prizes have become, compared to what they were intended to be. As intended, they were meant to make resources available to those who had the potential. One should have awarded prizes to 40-minus rather than 60-plus.

However, identifying people early is high-risk and fraught with uncertainty. There is no guarantee of success. It is easier to reward those who are successful. Hence, unless Abhinav Bindra, Sushil Kumar and Vijender compete in 2012, this largesse doesn’t improve India’s medal prospects, except to the extent some announcements made (stadiums, academies) lead to positive externalities beyond the individuals concerned. It’s that which ensures that K.D. Jadhav doesn’t become a flash in the pan, or for that matter, Leander Paes, Karnam Malleswari or Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore. If one looks at medals on offer in Olympics and asks where resources are likely to have the greatest impact, measured in terms of medal wins per rupee spent, one zeroes in on track and field, swimming, cycling, gymnastics, wrestling, canoeing, shooting and weight-lifting. Whether resources are private or public, they have opportunity costs and any efficient decision-making requires prioritisation and focus. Instead of such targeting, our expenditure is more of the shotgun type. Shoot a large number of pellets at a broad canvas and hope something somewhere sticks. That doesn’t work. Consider India’s performance in events short of global — the Asian Games, the Commonwealth Games. The track record is decent enough.

But jacking up performance from these localised competitions to levels required in global competitions like the Olympics requires a much greater expenditure of resources. In instances where such resources have flowed in, regardless of whether they are Olympic events or not, there are demonstrated successes — chess, billiards, snooker, golf, tennis, shooting, even cricket. Invariably, these are private resources. Public expenditure has had doubtful efficiency even in these sports. Private resources can flow in wherever they wish to. But in so far as public resources are concerned, the argument thus is that we should be spending on track and field, swimming, cycling, gymnastics, canoeing, shooting and weight-lifting, rather than field hockey. Take the Indian Olympic Association, which sells National Club Games as events that will identify and take athletes up from 639,144 villages and 606 districts to global levels. The sports identified for these games are volleyball, football, handball, basketball, kabaddi, hockey and kho kho. Why were these chosen and not others? We do have a National Sport Policy 2001, though the existence of a policy is typically inversely correlated with success. This states: “Various sports disciplines will be prioritised on the basis of proven potential, popularity and international performance. Particular emphasis will be placed on the development of such priority disciplines and the prioritisation reviewed, from time to time.¶

There is no evidence of any such prioritisation. If there is prioritisation and focus, positive externalities snowball. Unless one believes that everything is in our stars (genes), Ethiopia and Kenya in middle-distance running, Jamaica in sprints, Uzbekistan in boxing and wrestling demonstrate focus does matter. Will we ever obtain focus in public expenditure? It certainly hasn’t happened in other areas of public expenditure. Therefore, unlike core governance areas like health, education, law and order, roads, electricity, why should the government spend money on fostering athletes? We aren’t China, the Soviet Union or GDR and there is no half-way house towards that model. Instead, post-1991, the model we are veering towards is the private resource-driven model of the US and the UK.

Not only is that more efficient, it also tends to be more decentralised and better at targeting. All of Kenya didn’t produce runners; a very small geographical area did. India’s 2008 success is also limited to a small geographical area. To this, one can add another speculative point. Post-1991 reforms have switched focus to the individual, as opposed to the collective identity. Does that translate into greater possible success in individual sports, as opposed to collective ones? Cricket is an exception. Barring that, all of India’s successes have been individual and all National Club Games identify the collective. Field hockey successes should probably be restricted to the domain of Bollywood films.