“Why can’t we just play for fun?” That’s the foundational sentiment that built Sportz Village, one of India’s largest school sports and physical education organisations. In a country routinely fixated on Olympic medal tallies, elite academies, and athlete development schemes, one could expect a school sporting infrastructure to aim to churn out international champions.
In an exclusive online interview with HT Sports, Saumil Majmudar, co-founder, CEO, and Managing Director, challenged the foundational assumption of how youth sport is viewed across the nation.
Majmudar asks, “Why can’t we just play for fun? Why should there be an objective? Why should there be a pathway?”
“The moment you bring the pathway as a prerequisite for getting kids to play, you get stuck—because then you get into what is the federation doing, what is government doing, what are sponsors doing. Then we get into all kinds of crying about nobody supporting sports. But if you just want neighbourhoods where kids are playing, none of that is required. Because kids play for fun.”
It is a refreshing philosophy that reframes grassroots sport entirely: moving away from an exclusive, elite talent factory and towards a universal, educational right for every child.
“We started playing for fun, and then you found, oh, you’re getting better, and then you found some inter-school. You never started playing saying, ‘I’ll play for the country or play for the state’. That notion of play for fun has to get the respect it deserves.”
Creating that environment was what drove Majmudar to start Sportz Village in Bengaluru in 2003. Over the last 17 years, the organisation has focused on schools as its primary node of sports education. Today, the company deploys roughly 1,100 trainers who conduct 6,000 classes daily across 600 schools across India.
The model relies on working within existing infrastructures rather than building capital-intensive retail facilities. “In India, we have like a million government schools, we have a lakh private schools, we have 30 crore kids going to schools,” Majmudar says.
“If you find a way to crack this key, for getting kids to play inside the school, around the school, we actually have a scalable solution… You’re leveraging existing facilities set up by schools, existing grounds, existing safe spaces, pick up and drop, parents’ comfort.”
When looking at the numbers behind elite athlete development, Majmudar argues that building an entire national sporting culture solely around top-tier pathways is mathematically flawed.
For the thirty crore or so kids that go to schools, only about five thousand are involved in streamlined elite sports pathways like Khelo India. That’s less than half a per cent. Even at the individual school level, the competitive funnel shrinks rapidly. In a typical school of 1,000 children, Majmudar estimates that roughly 50 make the school team, and only two or three progress to district or state levels. Less than 1% ever reach a semi-professional or professional track—a progression heavily dictated by economic status, parental support, and sponsorship rather than pure athletic aptitude alone.
To address the remaining 99% of children, Majmudar believes that physical activity must be integrated with the same underlying purpose as traditional academic subjects. He asks me, “You learned history, you learned biology. Are you a historian or a biologist? Why did you learn it?”
That is his basic premise — that sports, as education and activity, should not be built around the aim of becoming a professional athlete, but simply to learn, grow and enjoy.
“That’s the justification for the 45-minute class every day. Fundamentally, our position is that sports are a part of education. The moment you change from that lens as education to a career lens, you get stuck [because] we denigrate our work by putting a success criteria [on it] which is extremely exclusive.”
To prove the value of physical education to school boards, parents, and corporate sponsors, Sportz Village relies heavily on back-end statistical tracking. Now in its 14th edition, the organisation’s Annual Health Survey measures longitudinal fitness data (like aerobic capacity, strength, speed, and endurance) across thousands of students nationwide.
“From the time we started, we wanted to bring data to the conversation around sports, which till then had always been very emotional,” Majmudar said. “There was no data for the stakeholders who were making the budget decision. We’ve brought in the data of assessment, of impact, of improvement… so stakeholders could take a data-driven decision on what to fund next”.
While policy initiatives like the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 have mandated daily physical education, Majmudar remains sceptical of top-down directives as the primary driver of change.
“The fundamental construct has to come bottom-up, with parents of a school — government or private — demanding a better quality of sports experience for their children.”
Majmudar also highlights a global paradox regarding elite sporting achievements. “The countries with the highest Olympic medals—the US, the UK, and Australia—also have the highest obesity rates. So what’s going on? Clearly, the bottom of the pyramid is not playing. The top 0.01% is playing… It’s not trickling down”.
Instead of directing public funds primarily toward high-profile infrastructure, he believes in advocating for investments that lower the barriers to daily activities for ordinary families, for whom space and time remain the two biggest hurdles.
“Should we spend 2,000 crores on a stadium or should we spend 2,000 crores on creating playgrounds, which are going to last for 25, 30, 50 years?”
“I would rather that we use the large events to drive participation, to drive neighbourhood playgrounds, to drive safe roads where kids can walk across and go and play”.
Sportz Village and Majmudar’s vision is a return to basic principles. Elite pathways and international medals may follow naturally, but they cannot be the starting point for a nation’s youth.
First, kids must play to discover fun. “Then, they find the pathway”.
