A new government initiative has designated sports as a CSR priority for India’s PSUs for the first time. This comes in an era where kabaddi is making richer bucks than soaps, where an 18-year-old from Chennai is crowned world chess champion, where Indian women’s cricketers have brought home a World Cup – yet where Indian corporations still distribute out more money for quarterly advertisements than the country’s entire Olympic ecosystem combined.
On June 18, 2026, a Joint Director of the Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) (Department of Public Enterprises, Government of India) released a two-page Office Memorandum that may, perhaps with hardly any notice, alter the way sports are financed in the country. For the first time in the history of sports, it was granted legitimacy by being clubbed along with “Development of Sporting Activities”, Anganwadi nutrition infrastructure, and livelihood generation as a Common CSR theme for all CPSEs for 2026-27 and 2027-28. Since 2018, DPE has directed India’s roughly 250 CPSEs – which include companies ranging from ONGC and Coal India to NTPC – to invest at least 60 percent of their CSR spending on the themes that it declares common. First, education and health were considered common themes, followed by nutrition. Prioritisation of sports is never a common theme. Still, it has been an eligible CSR activity under the Companies Act 2013, and its CSR funding has remained an insignificant issue. This order is DPE’s move to make sports relevant in the numbers game.
The CPSE order follows India’s much larger government push. A jump of more than 1,133 crore to 4,479.88 crore for the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports – from the previous year’s revised estimate of “346 crore” – has marked the sharpest year-on-year increase in the budget in recent times for fiscal 2026-27. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman used the budget to announce a 10-year successor to the Khelo India program, the Khelo India Mission, which will focus on training centers at the beginner, intermediate, and elite levels. Khelo India itself has been allocated 924.35 crore, the largest-ever allocation. The Sports Authority of India gets 917.38 crore, and a new line of 500 crore has opened up for the year’s sports-goods manufacturing, with a target to reach the top 10 among global sporting nations by 2036 and the top 5 by 2047. All this is backed by India’s aim to be one of the top 10 sport-loving nations in the world by 2036 and in the top 5 by 2047.
Below all this is the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS), which was introduced in 2014 and supports 98 elite “Core Group” athletes across 13 sports (in addition to hockey), and 165 development pipeline athletes, with stipends of 50,000 and 25,000 per month to cover training, foreign trips, and equipment, respectively. And for grassroots sports, the Khelo India Games, from which more than 1.25 lakh girls and over 20,000 athletes have graduated since its inception, offers scholarships of up to 6.28 lakh annually for eight years.
Where has CSR money been spent in sports?
State efforts aside, India’s CSR spending on sports has not been historically significant. CSR in sports nationally grew from 57.6 crore in FY15 to roughly 307 crores in FY19, slightly dipped to 293.12 crore in FY20, and stood at about 526 crores in FY22-23- a real increase, in absolute terms, from FY15 to FY22-23, but only a fraction of the 34,900-plus crores India’s total CSR pie crossed in FY24. Numerous analyses of CSR filings through the late 2010s also suggested that sports accounted for well under 2% of corporate CSR spending, with most of it going to education and healthcare.
The companies contributing tell a story. JSW Group’s Inspire Institute of Sports, in Karnataka, which opened its doors in 2018, now draws more than 30 crore per year from a dozen-plus corporate CSR donors. TATA Steel supports academies in football, archery, and athletics, as does IndusInd Bank, with India’s vertical launched in 2016 that supports para-athletes and apparently backed nearly half of India’s athletes in the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics.HCL Foundation’s in-house Sports for Change’ is perhaps now one of the biggest on this scale: it has spent almost ₹80 crore and benGroup’s nearly 64,000 young athletes and two dozen para-athletes now competing on the international stage. One of those is Paralympian Preeti Pal, winner of the Arjuna Award following her success in the Paris 2024 Paralympics, as a result of the skills she gained from the program.
Non-profits such as the GoSports Foundation and Olympic Gold Quest, while India’s donations directly to individual athletes’ foundations now come from in-house funding, now come from CSR, a reliance that former India hockey captain and OGQ CEO Viren Rasquinha has described as having “at least 300% in the last 4-5 years”.
The new DPE order does not directly tap into this private pool of CSR funds; CPSEs constitute a distinct, state-owned part of the Indian corporate landscape.
But given that CPSEs are typically prone to direct a large part of their CSR funds toward themes that DPE has designated as common, officials anticipate the notification will lead to the allocation of significantly more institutional resources toward grassroots infrastructure, training, and athlete support than sports has previously attracted.
The Cricket Which Overshadows Other Sports
Any Indian athlete who isn’t a cricketer and whom you ask to tell you where the money is wouldn’t have to search for too long. Our hockey team, despite an eight-Olympic-gold lineage, managed to scrape a bronze at the 2024 Paris Games while practicing in facilities and receiving financial backing that even the smallest Indian Premier League franchises would consider economical. Our wrestlers, shooters, and boxers are piecing together their sponsorships on a season-by-season basis. Our academies in badminton and athletics run on the goodwill of a select few corporate foundations that are willing to spare a glance at anything that wouldn’t tickle. It’s less a funding gap and more a funding void, most tangible when we place cricket’s earnings alongside those of every other sport.
It’s impossible to talk about sports finances in India without inevitably encountering cricket’s scale. For FY25, the BCCI claimed revenue of 11,055 crore, up 13.5 percent year-on-year, while the IPL itself earned 12,005 crore – an event whose 2023-27 media rights fetched 48,390 crore (or some $6.2 billion) and whose value is assessed at about $8.4 billion. This year’s generation. It’s around 62 percent of global cricket revenue. In short, an average two-month T20 tournament crickets about twenty times as much money annually as its sport (in all its myriad forms) has ever earned from corporate CSR.
| Current Annual Figure | |
| BCCI total income, FY25 | 11,055 crore INR |
| IPL income, FY25 | 12,005 crore INR |
| India’s Sports Ministry Budget, FY26-27 | 4,479.88 crore INR |
| National CSR spend on sport (all sectors) | 526 crore INR |
Even women’s cricket now overshadows many sports’ total financial ecosystem – in 2023, WPL’s five franchises sold for a total of 4,669.99 crore in an auction and its 2025 season attracted a total of 250 million viewers – the boom, which preceded the women’s senior national team led by Harmanpreet Kaur triumphing against South Africa in Navi Mumbai for their maiden ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup trophy in November 2025.
Sports beyond the boundary
You cannot deny that cricket has always played a central role, yet today, other sports are also playing a bigger role in India’s sports industry. The Pro Kabaddi League started in 2014, and today it is far and away India’s second most-watched sport after the Indian Premier League (IPL). The tenth season saw 225 million viewers tune in for 38 billion minutes of content, and its media rights were valued at approximately 900 crores. As of 2025, 8 kabaddi players have exceeded 1 crore a year, a figure previously unheard of just a decade ago. According to industry estimates, the non-cricket sports sector, including Kabaddi and Kho Kho, accounts for 2,559 crores in India’s sports economy. Corporate interests from groups such as Adani SportsLine and JSW Sports are once again flowing into non-cricket sports, with the sector growing at nearly 24 percent per year. Individually, there have also been some individual breakthrough successes. In December 2024, eighteen-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju became the undisputed World Chess Champion and the world’s youngest undisputed world champion. Gukesh Dommaraju has achieved India’s rise from having just one grandmaster (Viswanathan Anand in 1988) to over eighty at present.
At the Olympics, India delivered 6 medals in Paris 2024, a silver medal in javelin from Neeraj Chopra and 2 bronzes from Manu Bhaker who had also previously made history by becoming the first Indian to win two Olympic medals in a single Olympic game, India’s other two medals included a bronze medal in shooting from Swapnil Kusale and a bronze medal in Men’s hockey and wrestling bronze from youngest Indian medallist Aman Sehrawat.
India finished 18th at the Olympics. In terms of the country’s all-time Olympic achievements, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games were the best in India’s history, with seven medals; London 2012 was second, where India bagged six medals. Now, Paris 2024 is the third-best showing ever by Indian athletes at the Olympics.
The numbers look promising – overall government spending on sports is on a fast track for the first time in years, the sporting field (apart from cricket) has already created viable commercial ecosystems for itself, and there’s now an institutional push for CPSEs to do the same through CSR. But since the DPE order contains no framework to measure the scheme, no minimum allocation in the sports arena and no reporting structure – unlike for example the government’s PMDDKY project that reports 117 KPIs to track it – whether the “development of sports activities” will turn into an actual financial channel for rural sports facilities and groundsmen or an annual report footnote listing a handful of jerseys given away as donations will only be known in the next two fiscal years.
Clear Cut CSR Desk
New Delhi, UPDATED: July 08, 2026 17:00 IST
Written By: Yatharth Pathak
