Sports and education needs to go hand-in-hand, says Kumble

Anil Kumble emphasizes the need to integrate sports and education for India to become a sporting nation.

Former India captain Anil Kumble stated that India will struggle to become a sporting nation unless it manages to successfully integrate sports and education.

The leg-spinning legend was speaking during the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between TENVIC Sports, an organisation co-founded by Kumble and former International table tennis player Vasanth Bharadwaj, and Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) here on Monday.

The MoU aims to launch academic and infrastructural initiatives to develop skilled professionals for the sports industry and provide career pathways for athletes, during and beyond their competitive years.

“I was an engineer and if anything went wrong, I knew that I would get a 9-to-5 job somewhere,” Kumble said. “That comfort meant I could go out and play. Sport is still seen as an extra-curricular activity. Unless we integrate, we are never going to be a sporting nation.”

Recently, badminton great P. Gopi Chand sparked a debate when he said that athletes should think twice before taking up sport if they were not economically well off. Kumble termed it a “fair statement”.

“You need a lot of resources. Even in cricket, the kit bag itself is costly. But it is also the responsibility of the athlete to think ‘how can I have a cushion or a fallback mechanism’.

“That is what we are trying to do. If you look at all the sporting nations, success comes through universities and college systems.”