The girl who wrestled her mother at home and became a World Champion

Babita had never wrestled a day in her life. She was a housewife. But when COVID shut the akhadas in 2020 and there was nobody left to train with, she became her daughter’s sparring dummy. Takedowns, holds, defensive drills, all practiced on a woman who had signed up for none of it, simply because there was no one else.

That daughter is Kajal Dhochak. She is now a two-time Under-20 World Champion in wrestling, and the story of how she got there says almost as much about Indian sports finance as it does about grit.

A perfect record and a bigger question

At the Under-20 World Wrestling Championships in Bratislava, Dhochak won the 76kg gold without giving up a single technical point. Across the tournament she outscored opponents 35-0.

She pinned Japan’s Miyu Takayama early, blanked Turkey’s Elmira Yasin 14-0 in the semis, then beat America’s Piper Fowler 6-0. In the final she took apart China’s Jingru Sun 7-0, the same wrestler she had already beaten once this year in Pattaya.
It was her fifth international gold in a single calendar year. Five golds, one teenager, one weight class that nobody in her village had bothered with before.

But wins like this raise an uncomfortable question that Indian sport rarely likes to ask out loud: who is paying for all this, and what happens to the wrestler once the medal ceremony ends?

From kabaddi village to heavyweight mat

Lath is wrestling country in the broad sense, Haryana has given India names like Yogeshwar Dutt and Bajrang Punia. But Lath itself was a kabaddi village. There was no tradition, no facility, no blueprint for a girl who wanted to wrestle heavy.

Dhochak’s uncle, Krishan Dhochak, had once wrestled at 96kg himself, training alongside Sushil Kumar and Yogeshwar Dutt, and even won bronze at Iran’s Takhti Cup. Money forced him out of the sport.

He joined the family’s passenger transport business in Sonipat instead. When he spotted the same build and the same hunger in his niece, he pushed her father Ravinder, himself a commercial driver, to let her train.

She started small, in 2017, at Guru Sadan School, at 38kg and 40kg in the sub-junior category. Nothing about the early years suggested a heavyweight champion.

Then the pandemic hit, gyms shut, and Dhochak put on weight the way a lot of people did during lockdown. Her coaches at Kuldeep Malik Sports Academy, Kuldeep Malik and Ajay Malik, made a call that changed everything.

Instead of forcing her back down to 50 or 55kg, they let her body go where it wanted and rebuilt her training around the 65kg-plus divisions. Her quick double-leg attacks stayed. The power just got bigger.

There was one problem nobody had planned for. Female heavy-category training partners barely exist in rural Haryana. So her coach put her up against heavier male wrestlers in the gym, and her mother took over at home.

That is not a heartwarming detail added for colour. That is the actual infrastructure gap Indian women’s wrestling runs on.

The village fight economy

Long before Bratislava, wrestlers like Dhochak grow up inside a completely different economy, the danga circuit.

Dangas are informal wrestling meets run by village panchayats, local patrons or temple committees during seasonal fairs. No Wrestling Federation of India oversight, no United World Wrestling rulebook. Just mud, a crowd, and cash on the line.

The money is real and it is immediate. A single bout can earn anywhere from ₹5,000 to over ₹100,000. Bigger regional titles pay out in tractors, motorcycles, even Murrah buffaloes, the prized Haryana breed that sells for serious money at livestock fairs. The state-run Bharat Kesri Dangal at the very top gives ₹1 crore to the winner, ₹50 lakh for second, ₹25 lakh for third.
For a family without savings, that is not pocket money. That can be a year’s income for one afternoon’s work.

But dangas are fought on mud, and international wrestling happens on synthetic mats. Constantly switching between the two messes with footwork and puts real strain on the knees. And the quick cash creates its own trap, young wrestlers keep entering danga after danga chasing prize money, wearing their bodies down instead of building the technical training that actually gets you to a World Championship final.

It is fast money that can quietly cost you the slow-built career.

What the government actually pays

To pull talent away from that cycle, the state runs its own schemes, though they come with their own frustrations.
Under the Khelo India Scheme, selected athletes get ₹6.28 lakh a year, split into ₹1.20 lakh in direct monthly transfers and roughly ₹5.08 lakh spent on academy fees, coaching, gear and medical support.

The Sports Authority of India put out more than ₹30.83 crore in 2023-24 for somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 athletes across all sports. Divide that up and it is not a lot per person, but it keeps the lights on.

Athletes closer to an Olympic medal move into the Target Olympic Podium Scheme. The Core Group gets ₹50,000 a month plus foreign camps and rehab. The Development Group gets ₹25,000 a month. This is where the state bets on athletes it thinks can actually podium at the Olympics, not just win junior titles.

Haryana’s own cash award policy sounds generous on paper, ₹6 crore for an Olympic gold, ₹3 crore for an Asian Games gold, ₹1.5 crore for a Commonwealth Games gold. But junior and cadet wrestlers get a fraction of that.

Junior category awards sit at 75% of the senior rate, sub-junior and cadet at just 50%. A Junior World gold works out to around ₹6.65 lakh, against ₹20 lakh or more for a senior world title.

Olympic medalist Bajrang Punia has said publicly that this gap makes no sense. A Junior World Championship, he has argued, demands nearly the same physical toll as a senior one.

Paying junior champions a quarter less makes it that much harder for them to fund the very training that gets them to the senior level in the first place. And the paperwork does not help either, athletes often wait out an entire financial year cycle just to see the money land.

The private money stepping in

Where government funding runs thin, corporate money has quietly built its own parallel structure.

JSW Group‘s Inspire Institute of Sport, a 42-acre, ₹100-crore campus in Vidyanagar, Karnataka, houses around 300 resident athletes across wrestling, boxing, judo, athletics and swimming, fully funded, coaching to nutrition to physiotherapy.

It runs feeder centres too, including one in Hisar, Haryana, built with SAI, feeding talent straight from villages like Lath into a real high-performance pipeline. The Wrestling Federation of India has extended its partnership with IIS through March 2029, and IIS even signed an MoU with United World Wrestling during the Paris Olympics.

Then there is Olympic Gold Quest, run more like a philanthropy than a business, scouting talent between ages 10 and 20 and working with academies like Delhi’s Chhatrasal Stadium to fund equipment, foreign trips and personal coaching.

Between the two, a small number of gifted teenagers get pulled out of the danga-and-scholarship grind and into something closer to a professional athlete’s life. The rest keep fighting for buffaloes.

The wall that catches most of them

Here is the part that should worry Indian wrestling more than it seems to. Winning junior gold does not solve the money problem. It just delays it.

Sports economists sometimes call it the monetization wall, that stretch between 18 and 21 when training costs shoot up and income does not follow.

Move into a heavy category like 76kg and the food bill alone changes shape. Monthly diet and supplement costs for a heavyweight wrestler can run ₹40,000 to ₹60,000, more than many rural households earn in that period altogether.

Add international sparring, because beating domestic opponents is not enough anymore, you need camps in Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and the annual bill for travel, visas and coaching support can cross ₹30 lakh. Then there is the sports medicine side, physiotherapy and biomechanical checks that a junior champion suddenly needs but rarely budgeted for.

And sponsors, the people who could theoretically fill that gap, mostly stay away. Corporate endorsement money in India chases established Olympic medalists and cricketers.

Junior champions are seen as unproven, a bet nobody wants to place yet. So a lot of these athletes end up back on one-off state cash awards or local appearances, waiting for a senior medal that may or may not come.

Government jobs are supposed to be the safety net here. Haryana’s Outstanding Sportspersons Service Rules offer direct recruitment for medallists. But verifying federation credentials, getting gradation certificates, clearing medical boards, all of it can take 12 to 24 months. During that entire window, a wrestler who has already won a world title is still paying her own bills.

What could actually fix this

None of this is unfixable, and some of the answers are fairly simple.

Co-funded transition grants, jointly backed by state sports departments, national federations and corporate CSR budgets, could specifically target U17 and U20 world champions for their first three years as seniors. That is exactly the window where most of them currently fall through the cracks.

A revived, expanded Pro Wrestling League could offer something the current system does not, contracted seasonal income and regular bouts against senior international opponents on home soil. Right now junior champions get medals but not match practice against the level they are about to be judged on.

And simply digitising the paperwork, automated verification for federation records and gradation certificates, would shrink that painful gap between winning a medal and actually getting paid for it.

Back to the mat at home

None of these numbers were on Kajal Dhochak’s mind in Bratislava. She was thinking about Jingru Sun’s hands, about the step-out point, about the double-leg that put her 3-0 up at the break.

But somewhere behind that gold medal is a mother who agreed to be thrown around on a mat every evening because there was no one else, an uncle who gave up his own wrestling career for a transport business, and a coach who looked at a teenager gaining weight during lockdown and decided that was not a problem to fix but a category to move into.

Dhochak has already done her part twice over, at 72kg in Bulgaria and now at 76kg in Slovakia. What happens next depends less on her legs and more on whether the money finally catches up to the medals.

Her mother is probably still on that mat, waiting for the next round.