Sports Ministry set to discard yoga as sports discipline

Sabi Hussain

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 23

From January 1, yoga will no longer be a sports discipline. Within 15 months of its high-profile inclusion in the ‘priority’ category of sports, alongside disciplines like football and swimming, the Sports Ministry has decided to discard yoga as a competitive sport. Once discarded, there will be no competitive age-group yoga competitions at the district, state and zonal levels, nor will it be compulsory in schools, colleges and universities as part of their curriculum.

The Health Ministry’s department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH) will take charge of yoga, and it will be performed purely for recreational purpose from January 1, 2017.

So what happened within 15 months that the Sports Ministry lost interest in yoga? What happened to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s aggressive push to promote yoga as a ‘sport’ to popularise it globally after he had called for the adoption of June 21 as the International Yoga Day? Well, it is the Ministry’s lack of vision and its inability to hold national championships that forced it to drop yoga as a sport. After yoga’s formal introduction in the ‘priority’ category on September 1, 2015, the Ministry found it difficult to form the Yoga Federation of India (YFI) and hold the Nationals. “We failed to realise before including yoga as a sport that there was no way we could have held a national championship with so many aasnas involved,” said a source in the Ministry. 

“In which category we could have held a championship? After discussing the issue with a number of yoga experts, the Ministry concluded that it would be nearly impossible to hold the Nationals. Moreover, there were no genuine people coming forward to form a federation. A few proposals we received were all disputed, and they had no real intention to promote yoga. They were all looking at government funding. The Ministry should have done its homework before announcing yoga as a sports discipline.” 

The Ministry’s idea was to bring yoga at par with gymnastics and push for its inclusion in the Commonwealth and Asia Games. Such was the urgency shown by the Ministry to include yoga as sport that it tweaked its own rules. As per the Ministry’s rules, any sport to be included in the ‘priority’ list should be a part of the Olympics, Asian or Commonwealth Games. Yoga wasn’t even a sport, yet it was straightaway put in the ‘priority’ list.