SS Dhawan did not have a secretary. He did not have a filing cabinet, or a typist, or even a proper office. What he had was a small apartment in New Delhi, a wife who answered letters for him, and ten months to help organise a sporting event for 11 nations.
That was the entire back office of the first Asian Games in 1951.
Today, India is trying to build the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Sports Enclave in Gujarat for 6,000 crore rupees. It is chasing a top 10 finish at the 2036 Olympics. It has a sports ministry budget nearing 4,480 crore rupees.
None of that machinery existed 75 years ago. Back then, there was Dhawan, his wife, a stack of letters and a man named Anthony de Mello who was, in every practical sense, running the show on borrowed money and borrowed goodwill. This is where the story of Indian sports business actually begins. Not in a boardroom. In a flat with no clerk.
A Games with no budget and no army of its own
Picture Delhi in early 1950. Partition was barely two years behind the country. There was no cinder track worth the name, no dedicated stadium built for international competition, and certainly no government line item marked “Asian Games.”
The event was supposed to happen in February 1950. It didn’t. Money simply wasn’t there and Guru Dutt Sondhi, the man who had first dreamed up a pan-Asian sporting union at a hotel in London in 1948, quit as Games Director in frustration.
Somebody had to save it. That somebody was Anthony de Mello, a cricket administrator who had already founded the Cricket Club of India and the National Sports Club of India. He took over with ten months left on the clock and, by his own later account in his 1959 memoir Portrait of Indian Sport, not a rupee of state money behind him.
What he did next reads less like Olympic history and more like a lesson in bootstrap finance.
He got the National Sports Club of India to hand the Indian Olympic Association an interest free loan of 1 lakh rupees, just to get the lights on. He then leaned on the Cricket Club of India at Brabourne Stadium for a bigger, undisclosed sum.
Which means, oddly enough, that the very first Asian Games were substantially funded by cricket money, even though cricket itself would not appear on the Asian Games program until Guangzhou in 2010. Sport financing sport that had nothing to do with it. Nobody plans that. It just happens when you’re desperate and the cricket club has cash.
Then came the part that really shows de Mello’s instinct for people. He didn’t ask government for a grant. He asked ordinary sports lovers to buy in. Ten wealthy patrons at 10,000 rupees each. Twenty more at 5,000. And thousands of everyday members buying lifetime memberships for 1,000 rupees apiece.
By the time the Games opened, Delhi had signed up 7,000 lifetime members and Bombay had 10,000. That crowdfunded money built the National Stadium in Delhi, budgeted at 30 lakh rupees, and the Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium in Bombay, budgeted at 20 lakh.
Think about what that means. A shopkeeper in old Delhi, or a clerk in Bombay, could put down 1,000 rupees and feel he owned a small piece of something India had never done before. That is not so different from a fan today buying a stake in a franchise, except there was no stock ticker, no app, just a paper receipt and a bit of faith.
There was no money for an Athletes’ Village either. So de Mello went to General KM Cariappa, the Army Chief, and simply asked for two barracks. The Army handed over housing for a thousand athletes and officials. Problem solved, no cash spent.
Equipment was another headache.
Indian gear was primitive next to what other nations were bringing. De Mello flew to London and talked the sporting goods firm Lillywhites into diverting stock that had been earmarked for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, just so Delhi’s athletes could compete on something close to equal footing.
The government, for its part, gave what it could without opening its wallet: full customs duty waivers on imported gear, half price rail fares for visiting teams, cars for dignitaries. Concessions, not cheques.
It shouldn’t have worked. It did.
The Games open and Japan comes back from the cold
On March 4, 1951, President Rajendra Prasad declared the Games open at the National Stadium, with Jawaharlal Nehru watching. Fifteen Army trumpeters played. Eleven hundred white pigeons went up into the Delhi sky. 489 athletes from 11 nations marched in. Dalip Singh lit the torch. Baldev Singh took the oath.
There was politics in who wasn’t there too. The Soviet Union and Vietnam weren’t invited. China was invited but missed the paperwork deadline. And Japan, banned from the 1948 London Olympics for its role in the war, walked back into international sport at Delhi and topped the medal table with 24 gold medals, ahead of host India’s 15.
The human stories from that fortnight still hold up. Sachin Nag won India’s first ever Asian Games gold in the 100 metre freestyle, a title India has never repeated in swimming since.
Lavy Pinto won both sprint golds, the only Indian to win more than one gold at those Games, clocking 10.8 seconds in the 100 metres.
The Indian football team, coached by Syed Abdul Rahim and captained by Sailen Manna, played mostly barefoot against fully booted opponents and still won gold, beating Iran 1-0 in the final on a goal from SK Mewalal.
There was even a bodybuilding contest with no medal attached. India’s Parimal Roy beat Iran’s Mahmoud Namdjou, a reigning world weightlifting champion, for the Mr. Asia title. Namdjou wasn’t pleased. “It is not fair competition when a Mr. Universe finalist cannot be Mr. Asia,” he said afterward. You can almost hear the sulk in it.
When it was over, de Mello wrote to Nehru, calling him “our supreme captain” and saying he’d done his “humble bit to make that magic work and be seen by Asia.” Nehru, not a man given to easy praise, told him the organisation had set a template others could follow.
He wasn’t wrong. He just had no idea how expensive that template would eventually get.
What India is building now, and why it matters to more than athletes
The Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports got 3,794 crore rupees in the 2025-26 budget reportedly, up 17 percent from the year before, with 1,000 crore going to the Khelo India grassroots scheme, 830 crore to the Sports Authority of India, and 400 crore to National Sports Federations.
In 2026-27, that budget grew again to 4,479.88 crore, an increase of 1,133.34 crore over the revised prior year figure, and for the first time it included a dedicated 500 crore rupee fund to support domestic sports goods manufacturing under Make in India.
That last number deserves a pause. For 75 years India imported its athletic gear, quite literally borrowing spare stock from London firms in 1951 just to compete.
A dedicated manufacturing fund means the country is finally trying to make its own bats, shoes and equipment at scale, not just chase medals but build the supply chain behind them. It’s a small allocation next to the headline numbers, but it changes who profits when a young athlete buys her first pair of spikes.
And the market is noticing. India’s sports technology sector, covering everything from fan apps to performance analytics to smart stadiums, was valued at 501.3 million dollars in 2025 and is projected to hit 1,528.5 million dollars by 2034, growing at nearly 12.8 percent a year, according to IMARC Group.
None of that existed as a category in de Mello’s time. Back then, technology meant a working telephone line and a typewriter that didn’t jam.
The biggest bet sits in Gujarat. The Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Sports Enclave in Motera is being built across 350 acres at a cost of 6,000 crore rupees, designed to meet Olympic standards, as India eyes hosting the 2036 Games and aims for a top five global finish by 2047.
It is, in every sense, the opposite of what Dhawan did from his flat. It is planned, funded upfront, backed by state money, built for permanence rather than improvisation.
Whether that is progress or just a different kind of risk depends on who you ask. The 1982 and 2010 overruns show what happens when big public money meets weak oversight. India’s 2036 bid will likely be judged less on how much it spends and more on whether it spends wisely, the way de Mello did when every rupee had to be argued for and every barrack had to be borrowed.
Coming back to the flat
There is something worth remembering in that small Delhi apartment where SS Dhawan and his wife typed, filed and answered letters without a single paid assistant. They had almost nothing to work with, and they still helped stage a Games that Nehru called a template for the region.
India today has budgets that would have seemed unimaginable to de Mello, crores where he counted lakhs, a manufacturing fund where he once begged a London shop for leftover stock. The scale has changed completely.
But the question hasn’t. It is still about whether the people spending the money care as much about getting it right as Dhawan did, typing away in that flat, with nobody watching and nothing to lose but the Games itself.