While the Big Bash League’s season opener in Chennai later this year may be the shiny ribbon on a push for greater India-Australia sporting collaboration, a new sports education programme between the two countries hopes to deepen the tie-up further.
At Khel Connect, a symposium organised by the Australia India Institute and funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, educators, sporting administrators and industry leaders from both countries met on Monday to discuss closer collaboration in high performance, community engagement and commercial expertise.
“This symposium is really about bringing two forces together by pairing Australia’s deep expertise with India’s scale, ambition and talent,” Australia India Institute CEO Lisa Singh said to open the day.
Sandeep Nanduri IAS, secretary of the Tamil Nadu Youth Welfare and Sports Development Department, and J. Meghanatha Reddy, member secretary of the Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu, vouched for scouting, coaching and strategic partnerships with regions like Australia to strengthen the state’s existing elite sports pathway. The duo highlighted the government’s role in funding and stressed the need for outside expertise to refine those efforts.
Anupam Goswami, league commissioner of the Pro Kabaddi League and Executive General Manager at Sports Leagues for JioStar, pointed to the PKL’s ‘Melbourne Raid’ event, organised with Victorian stakeholders in late 2024 to take the indigenous Indian sport to a new, interested community.
“As much as innovation is growing, there is a growth in sports consumption tech as well. India can greatly contribute there. It is going to redefine the way we engage with and succeed in sport,” he said, urging stakeholders to harness India’s sports-crazy population for greater commercial benefit.
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High-performance with intention
With Australian universities and sporting federations increasingly open to coaching camps, staff education and technical training, Rob Aughey, Head of Discipline, Exercise and Sports Science at Federation University, called for short, targeted ‘coach the coach’ programmes.
“The answer is not traditional university coaching. We can’t send athletes or coaches off for three-year courses because by the time their course is done, especially if it’s around sports technology, they might as well start again. These efforts need to be short, sharp and flexible. We need to go to coaches rather than have them come to us. Shorter programmes also mean they’re answering questions directly relevant to them and their sport, and we get greater buy-in and more bang for our buck,” said Aughey, whose research has involved collaborations with elite organisations like FIFA, during a discussion on ‘Athlete and coach development pathways and high-performance support services.’
Olympian Hakimuddin Habibulla, who swam for India at the 2000 Sydney Games, said knowledge exchanges in Australia introduced him to swim teachers, a role significantly different from that of elite or elite-aspiring coaches.
“This is a massive gap in India. If people are not learning the fundamentals right and in a holistic manner, which includes how they engage with water not only in a pool but beyond, they won’t be able to harness a starting point that countries like Australia have.
“Coaches come in with the assumption that basics are in place. Their ability to help someone unlearn and relearn is limited because the stakes are already quite high. This is where the transition (from grassroots to elite level) ends,” he added.
Aadhithya Chakravarthy, Head of Performance at Chennai football academy FC Madras, outlined common errors analysts make.
“Academies collect data to rank players based on where they are today when they should be looking at results five years from now. Another mistake is that there are always better fish in the pond. So every year, when trials happen, they find a better player and weed out the existing ones. Early maturers look great in their age group while late maturers struggle to catch up. But there are documented cases of late bloomers who, given time, eventually shape up and even go professional. That patience in the process is key,” he explained.
“We also need to stop picking one data point to start flagging people. In hockey, I’ve seen players who hit their peak heart rate too soon. If you don’t understand the data, you’ll end up taking them out. But there might be players who can sustain that peak for a steady amount of time. We need to give the right education all through to produce the talent the country actually needs,” he said.
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Prioritising community
In a discussion on ‘Community sports development and adaptive physical education,’ Rekha Dey, Partner at Tanjun Associate LLP, underlined the need for employment security in sport.
“More vocational pathways and livelihood options are imperative. It will close the cycle and add value to community sports. We also need an industrial body that can bring community sports initiatives under one canopy so they can work together,” said Dey, who has led grassroots sport-for-development projects under Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Arun Vasu, president of the Indian and Asian Surfing Federation, has spent decades using sport as a social welfare tool. What began as a CSR activity has grown into a sporting system with elite-level ambitions.
“Sport came much later. It was a tool to make inroads into the communities. We chose fishing villages in Tamil Nadu and introduced surfing as an alternative to fishing. There were other issues like drinking and drugs we wanted to tackle on the side. Things began changing when they learnt a sport and started making a living out of it. Livelihood is an important eventuality. In a few of these pockets, people who learned surfing from us have set up their own surf schools and a whole ecosystem around the sport, including restaurants and homestays,” Vasu explained.
Nandan Kamath, managing trustee of GoSports Foundation and a respected sports lawyer, called community sport the heartbeat of the ecosystem.
“No high-performance system is ever going to humanise the athlete. Community sport becomes the other side of the high-performance coin. Towards that end, a large part of our work involves making sports permissionless,” Kamath said.
He called for more funding to trickle down to self-governance structures like panchayats to energise the grassroots, while Vasu pushed for cross-country exchanges, like India and Australia’s, to help athletes surf at different venues and diversify their skills.
Matching expertise with scale
With India hosting the 2030 Commonwealth Games and bidding for the 2036 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, major event capability, sports business, innovation and commercialisation took centre stage in the day’s final panel.
Prof. Mahesh V Panchagnula, founder and head of the IIT Madras Center of Excellence on Sports Science and Analytics, sought to redirect the priorities of sports tech innovation.
“Sports tech markets are quite limited. The risk is in getting stuck with the ones and twos and not scaling up. Positioning sport as a health choice needs to be the main proposition. That’s where start-ups need to step in. Elite athlete-facing tech narrows your consumer base and is rarely going to be commercially viable,” he said.
He added that ‘brands’ like IIT-Madras add value by pioneering new tech, developing educational material from sport with wider societal implications, and nurturing the start-up sector through investment, mentorship or by serving as a testing and reviewing platform. He also pushed for sport to be a graded subject in schools to win parental buy-in and widen the grassroots pool.
Dr. Sheila Nguyen, former Head of Sustainability for the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, cautioned against drawing on community resources without a plan to leave a legacy.
“We are distracted by ticket sales, broadcast numbers, and money spent. These are singular, finite things. We need to broaden our perspective on hosting big events. They are more than nation-building exercises; they are also community-building exercises. If infrastructure improves, it can improve all the services around that facility and force people to upgrade, but it needs to be done with intention,” she said.
Vik Singh, Trade and Investment Commissioner for Austrade in South Asia, called for deeper, more meaningful partnerships.
“Last month, Cricket Australia and Cricket ACT (the body that organises cricket in the Australian Capital Territory) ran a challenge for over 35 schools from across India in Bengaluru. It is terrific to see the community involvement, and this was only the second year. We’ve seen ties emerge in coaching exchanges and community development here.
“But there are challenges. There is demand for Australian coaches here, and the best way to meet it is face-to-face, but that’s also the most expensive. At Austrade, we look at a few ways to ensure depth in our commercial alignments. Firstly, we have been expanding our network. Earlier, we would come to the Jio Institute in Navi Mumbai for its reputation, but we now know several other institutions across India are doing good work. Secondly, everyone loves signing MoUs (Memorandums of Understanding), but when the smallest tremor comes, these projects are often dropped and never picked up again. And third, we want to foster deeper two-way communication. According to NITI Aayog a few years ago, for every 20 students India sends on an exchange programme, it gets back one. That imbalance needs to be fixed,” he said.
Published on Oct 13, 2026