RTI : Parliament panel’s red flag: National Sports Development Fund is shrinking, use it responsibly - Written by: Mihir Vasavda

The Indian Express: Mumbai: Thursday, 14 May 2026.
What’s really worrying, the panel said, was that while the private sector has largely kept its distance from the Government-led initiative, even Public Sector Undertakings are pulling back now.

General view of the New Moti Bagh clubhouse

Contributions to the National Sports Development Fund (NSDF) have more than halved in three years from Rs 85.26 crore in 2023-24 to Rs 37.02 crore in 2025-26, records obtained by The Indian Express under the Right to Information (RTI) Act show.
The slide prompted a Parliamentary panel to raise the red flag last August, linking the decline to waning corporate faith in the Sports Authority of India (SAI) and a growing preference among donors for privately run sports organisations.

The tennis court at New Moti Bagh clubhouse

What’s really worrying, the panel said, was that while the private sector has largely kept its distance from the Government-led initiative, even Public Sector Undertakings are pulling back now.
The numbers spell out the trend (see chart):

• In 2023-24, ten government-backed institutions donated approximately Rs 84.79 crore of the Rs 85.26 crore the NSDF received that year. Coal India alone contributed Rs 47.85 crore.
• By 2024-25, the number of contributing PSUs had dropped to six, accounting for roughly Rs 69.89 crore of a total Rs 70.16 crore.
• In 2025-26, the six PSUs remained but the total contributions fell to Rs 37.02 crore, of which they provided Rs 34.79 crore.

The private sector, in each of these years, was nearly absent. The fund’s shrinking base makes the diversions investigated by The Indian Express harder to defend. As the money coming in dips, the share being spent on bureaucrats’ colonies and civil services clubs, which have nothing to do with competitive sport, grows more difficult to justify.
The Parliamentary standing committee that examined the fund’s finances found a telling illustration of the problem.

This temperature-controlled swimming pool at the New Moti Bagh clubhouse in New Delhi is one of the sports facilities funded by a Rs 2.2-crore NSDF grant in 2024. (Photo: Mihir Vasavda)

During depositions, Sports Ministry officials acknowledged that while SAI’s centre in Bengaluru received CSR funding of Rs 5 crore, a private badminton academy in the same city received Rs 25 crore. “The Committee is constrained to observe that corporates are showing more faith and inclination towards funding a privately run sports body than SAI,” the report, tabled in the Lok Sabha in August 2025, noted.
The 31-member all-party panel, chaired by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh and including BJP MPs such as Ravi Shankar Prasad and Sambit Patra, recommended that the Government take up the matter with the Ministry of Finance or the Ministry of Corporate Affairs “so that suitable amendments be effected in CSR rules/ regulations in such manner that Government Institutions may be equal beneficiary of the CSR funding in the area of sports”.
Its conclusion: “…these CSR funds should strictly be utilised in the development of sports infrastructure, coaching, etc.”