Making the Business Case: How Indian Corporates Can Do More for Sport

Indian companies are not disinterested in sport. Dream11, ITC, Mahindra, JSW, Tata, Adidas, Puma — the list of major corporates with significant sports investments is long and growing. Digital broadcasting deals with Jio, Hotstar, FanCode and GXR have transformed how sports rights are acquired and monetised. JSW has partnered with the Indian Olympic Association and national sports federations to develop grassroots talent. The money is moving.

And yet, when you look at the aggregate numbers, the picture is underwhelming. Sport receives less than 1% of the total CSR contributions made by eligible Indian companies under the Companies Act. Most sports sponsorship is concentrated in cricket, with football, kabaddi, and badminton attracting a fraction of that attention. The gap between what corporate India spends on sport and what it could spend — and what the sporting ecosystem needs — is enormous.

The CSR Framework and Its Underperformance

Under the Companies Act, 2013, companies with a net worth of ₹500 crore or more, a turnover of ₹1,000 crore or more, or a net profit of ₹5 crore or more must allocate at least 2% of their average net profit over three years to Schedule VII activities. Training to promote rural, nationally recognised, Paralympic and Olympic sports is listed in Schedule VII. But less than 1% of total CSR contributions reach the sporting sector.

Two problems drive this underperformance. First, the definition of eligible sports activities is narrow — it is read to exclude elite sports development, sports science infrastructure, and esports, all of which have a legitimate developmental role. Second, even where companies opt to support sport, the approach is often non-strategic: one-off donations to a federation or tournament rather than sustained programmatic investment. There is no matching grant or tax credit mechanism that incentivises multi-year commitments.

Three Recommendations for Unlocking Corporate Engagement

First, companies whose products are restricted from advertising on public health grounds — tobacco, alcohol, certain pharmaceuticals — should be required to allocate a larger proportion of their CSR funds to sports development. There is a compelling public health logic here: companies that profit from health-reducing products should invest meaningfully in health-promoting activities, and sport is the most direct and measurable form of that investment.

Second, digital rights frameworks for sporting leagues and events should be structured to incentivise domestic corporate investment in rights acquisition. The current landscape, where international streaming platforms acquire rights over domestic competitors, limits the reinvestment of sports media revenues into the Indian ecosystem. Preferential rights bidding structures for Indian entities — modelled on the BCCI's domestic rights framework — would retain more commercial value within the country.

Third, the CSR definition for sports should be expanded to include sports technology, sports science infrastructure, athlete welfare programmes, and esports development. This would both widen the pool of eligible activities and align CSR investment with the sectors that will define Indian sport's global competitiveness over the next decade.

What Good Engagement Looks Like

The best examples of corporate engagement in Indian sport — Hero MotoCorp's "Be A Sporting Hero" CSR initiative, Reliance Foundation's "Sports for Development" programme, JSW's academy partnerships — share a common feature: they are long-term, programmatic, and athlete-centric. They are not logo placements. They are institutional investments in sporting infrastructure. That model should be the aspiration, and the policy framework should be designed to incentivise more of it.