Why a banker for three decades launched a sports startup

The second thing is that so many youngsters take to sport but, eventually, very few make it to the top. But even those who couldn’t make it to the top must have the ability to build a career in sport. But for that you need a certain education in science and technology and only passion can’t take you there. And finally, most sportspeople retire in their mid to late 30s, but have another 40-45 years ahead of them where they must lead a life of dignity and continue to contribute to sport. The intention behind this education was to build awareness, provide a safety net for people who play and then be able to create a second innings for athletes who have played at the highest level.

Q. What other the other programmes under NHA?

We have one called Flourishing Journeys, which is based on gaming. It has four different modules—tech and AI, excellence in expression, harnessing the creative economy and psychology of high performance. Pretty much all of India can do with these. The world is getting highly digitalised, as is India. Regardless of what your formal education is, you need a good understanding of technology and the way AI is shaping the world. Second, we are dealing with the generation which has been schooled on social media. And one of the things about social media is that if you need to build engagement and you want to be an effective voice there, you need to have good communication skills. Third, the fastest growing part of the Indian economy is the creator economy. Anybody who creates digital content and monetises it is part of that and we need to be able to have many more young Indians, who can benefit from it. If you can create this level of self-employment, it solves a burden on creating employment for industry.

The reason we base Flourishing Journeys a bit on gaming is that India has 650 million gamers. So gaming acts as a hook, but otherwise it teaches you real life skills.

Also read: It's a golden period to be an athlete in India: OGQ's Neha Aggarwal

Q. How can an esports based education programme help in developing, say, STEM skills?

I'll give you an example of Fortnite, which is a very popular online game. It’s based on an engine called Unreal Engine. This engine was created basically build Fortnite, but today it is used for city planning, war simulation games, designing car engines, film production etc. Through this programme, we use Unreal Engine and take you down the rabbit hole in terms of what the technology is, how it operates and where all does it find application? We use gaming as a metaphor for learning to make it a little more engaging and immersive.

Q. Why this overarching focus on sports education?

The general refrain is that India doesn't perform to its level in sport because of lack of infrastructure. Our view has been slightly different. We feel the reason why Indian sport is not where it can potentially be is because we don’t have many world class leaders of sport. There are people very good at the sport that oversee or manage, but, again, to come back to the point about science and technology, sporting excellence now is about mental health, physical conditioning, injury management, recovery, nutrition, data analytics. How do you expect an individual to have a reasonably firm grasp over all of this without formal training? You can always take an athlete to a certain level, but if you want that athlete to go and perform at an international level, you need a lot of other inputs coming in.

Think about the Paris Olympics—India had six fourth-position finishes. What are the factors that contributed to the fact that they could not cross the final hurdle and end up on the podium? In previous Olympics, India used to get outplayed, but that was not the case here. This was a case where having coaches, trainers, administrators who understand what drives excellence in modern sport is so important.

Q. How can this awareness about high performance be woven into the fabric even at an early level?

Typically, if you look at the science of high performance, that's applied at an elite level. The question is that why cannot it be brought much earlier, let's say, the middle and high school? That's one of the things that we're doing. If you look at Flourishing Journeys and the whole psychology of high performance, we are trying to build a culture of high performance in India starting from middle and high school. You don't need to be an elite athlete or play at the international level to be exposed to that.

What typically high performance does is it presumes the technical skills are there and it ups the mind game, your mental resilience, mental strength. Those are important in the Indian context not just for sport—look at the number of kids we have and the limited opportunities, and the pressure that subsequently creates to succeed. We want to nourish and nurture kids who will thrive under that pressure, right? To that extent, bringing this science of high performance into middle and high school is vital to my mind.

Q. What sort of adoption have you seen of these programmes?

We initially thought that we will take it to smaller groups, which are more sports-focussed. But the early adopters of this have actually been state governments who see this as an interesting skilling programme.

There is a Global Skills Park at Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, which is funded by the Asian Development Bank. The kids who come to study there are from engineering colleges, ITIs polytechnics, etc, and this is really for them the last mile in terms of what you've learned vis-à-vis how you apply it. When we took the programme there, we told the decision-makers that these kids have good technical skills, how do we build their peripheral knowledge in terms of, say, mastering social media, where a lot of businesses get built and marketed these days? Basically, their employability perspective. Typically, in India, 80 percent of kids who do engineering find it difficult to get employed. This batch that took this programme got 100% placement. Now obviously they got employed because they had the technical knowledge and the technical skills, but what also differentiated them in the interviews was the broader perspective which came from peripheral vision.

Q. You’ve worked with India’s top corporates for over 30 years. Your key takeaways from your banking career that you've brought over to the NHA?

Indian sport right now is at a fairly nascent stage and the next 5-10 years will see explosive growth. One of the challenges of a startup is your ability to build, scale and sustain. I can only imagine that my time working for large institutions, being part of them and seeing how they operate at a scale brings that perspective in terms of scaling up an organisation and then be able to harness that scale. One of the things working for large corporates helps you do is build a team, work collaboratively. And that's the reason why we call the company New Horizons Alliance—so that we will discover new horizons through strategic alliances. That's the education from the previous career that I bring.