How Tata Trusts’ Mizoram Grassroots Badminton Initiative seeks to groom India’s next P.V. Sindhu or Saina Nehwal

It is late in the afternoon, and 18-year-old Thazuala has just returned to his hostel room after a hectic training session at the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy (PGBA) in Hyderabad. The junior national champion from Mizoram has been training here for the past three years, and his goal is a medal at the world junior championship later this year.

Though Thazuala’s first coach was his own father, his journey from tossing the shuttle on the mud courts of Aizawl to representing his state in the national junior championships has been made possible thanks to Tata Trusts’ grassroots badminton programme in the state. “I have defeated several national players and I would never have dreamt of doing so had it not been for the grassroots training centre,” says Thazuala.

Between 2018 and 2025, the grassroots programme has groomed four national junior badminton champions from Mizoram — two of whom will be competing at the Asian Junior Championships this year. Mizoram, through the Tata Trusts, sends an average of 10-15 badminton players every year for high-performance training to the PGBA in Hyderabad and to the Institute of Technology Management in Raipur, which has a badminton academy funded by the Tata Trusts.

Spotting Talent

So, why did Tata Trusts invest in Mizoram for badminton? It has a lot to do with the sporting culture ingrained in their day-to-day living, explains Neelam Babadesai, head (sports), Tata Trusts. While hockey is a religion in most parts of Western Odisha and Jharkhand, in Mizoram, every church campus has a badminton court. “Adults in Mizoram play competitively with prize money and club sponsorships, while it is recreational for children. But the State lacked large badminton halls, there was no professional training facility,” says Babadesai.

Following an assessment of the potential for badminton in Mizoram conducted by the Mizoram Badminton Association, the association partnered with the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy to launch the grassroots intervention in 2018. “His team trained local coaches, we created a structured curriculum and started running grassroots centres. We maximised the use of available courts and trained as many children as possible. We also created competition opportunities by holding district and state-level tournaments.” Since Mizoram didn’t have a high-performance training centre, individuals like Thazuala were sent to PGBA for training, while others were sent to the Institute of Technology Management in Raipur.

However, the initiative truly assumed scale when the people of the badminton-loving State took the initiative to set up their own community-owned grassroots training centres. While the coaches are trained by Tata Trusts, 25 out of the 40 grassroots centres even pay their salaries (which could be between ₹7,000-8,000 per month). “It is a pay-and-play model where the community management committee collects a fee from the students who get trained. The fee could be as low as ₹25 and go up to as high as ₹300, depending on the geography and affordability of people.”

Babadesai clarifies that the Tata Trusts doesn’t earn revenue out of these grassroots centres. “We take care of the coach salaries of those centres which can’t afford it. Whatever they earn from the fees, we ask them to use it for the development of their centres. We also support them with shuttle corks and take care of their travel to participate in tournaments.”

Nurturing Grassroot Talent

Whether it is hockey in the states of Odisha and Jharkhand, badminton in Mizoram, football in Meghalaya and Manipur, or athletics in Uttarakhand, or getting primary schools to integrate physical education into their curriculum, sports and physical well-being have been an important area of the Trusts’ philanthropic focus. Since the Trust launched its sports vertical in 2017, nearly 40,000 children have received training in various sports, with many of them going on to represent their national teams. Around 45 footballers trained by Tata Trusts have been selected by multiple Indian Super League teams, while 3,000-4,000 students are being trained in professional hockey in Odisha and Jharkhand.

Although Babudesai hesitates to share the amount of funding allocated for the various grassroots sports initiatives, she says that a grassroots programme would, on average, require an investment of ₹1.5 crore per year. “The components you support also make a difference. For example, if I start giving kids shoes and full kits, the costs go up. We have kept it minimalist — we provide a training structure, tournaments, and equipment, but parents cover certain items, such as shoes. We give equipment at the centre level, not at an individual level, so costs stay lower.”

At the Naval Tata Hockey Academy in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, 17-year-old Dhrupati from the Sundergarh district of western Odisha is getting trained for the national hockey championship. She has already won medals in several youth tournaments nationwide. Her biggest achievement, she says, is gaining confidence. “I was used to playing in muddy grounds. From there, I was selected by Tata Trusts’ grassroots hockey programme selectors to play on turf (there are 17 hockey turfs across western Odisha). There, I got the first opportunity to shed all my fears and play with confidence. The academy has not just enabled me to become a good hockey player, but I am also getting an education. I am learning to speak English too.”

The Tata Trusts’ vision says Babadesai is to replicate its grassroots sports development model across the country. The sport, however, would be unique to that particular geography. “Just as hockey is unique to Odisha and Jharkhand and badminton to Mizoram, we will probably focus on sports such as kushti or kho-kho in those States where they are ingrained in the culture.”