Are sports bodies of Indian states promoting the game properly? NEW DELHI: Somewhere on a muddy school field in Haryana right now, a teenager is perhaps drilling the same throwing technique over and over, just as she had watched on television just days ago.
Her sole aim is to pull off the one like Sharmila Dhankar, India's Commonwealth Games shot put gold medallist. Before the 2026 CWG campaign, she, like many of us, had almost certainly never heard the name.
And it's not because Dhankar had not won anything before the Glasgow Games; she had, a gold medal in the Women's Shot Put F57 event at the 2026 Fazza International Para Athletics Championship, but because one of the primary institutions whose entire job was to carry that story back from the medal podium to villages and training grounds across the state has, for all practical purposes, gone quiet. That's the part of this story that rarely gets told.
India walked away from Glasgow with 39 medals, and for a week, the athletes who won them were everywhere, garlanded at airports, seated beside ministers, their faces on the evening news. But medals don't build the next generation of athletes by themselves.
Somebody has to keep telling their stories, long after the felicitation photo is filed away, to the kid training in a dusty school ground who needs proof that this path actually leads somewhere. Medal tally of India's athletes by birth state/UTWe wanted to know which state sports departments are still doing their job of promoting the sports and their grassroots on their social media platforms, and which ones seem to have simply logged off.
So we scrolled through the timelines ourselves. Here's what we found.
Haryana: Hit on the podium, not so much off itNo state produced more glory in Glasgow than Haryana. Eleven medallists, including seven gold, two silver, two bronze, spanning boxing, wrestling, athletics, and para sport, headlined by a Neeraj Chopra silver that will be replayed on sports channels for years.
Alongside him were names most of India still had little knowledge of. The likes of Preeti Pawar, Jaismine Lamboria, Sakshi Chaudhary, Priya Ghanghas, Sachin Siwach, and Ankush Panghal, all of whom trained in government facilities, under government schemes, and who'd probably appreciate their own state department cheering as loudly for them as it does for its concert lineups.
Because that's the thing. The Sports Department, Government of Haryana's X account has posted exactly once in all of 2026, and it's a flyer for the music acts playing at the Chief Minister's Cup.
