In 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi framed India's 2036 Olympic bid as the “age-old dream of 140 crore Indians”. With Ahmedabad now officially ratified as the host for the 2030 Commonwealth Games, the government is visibly leveraging its geopolitical capital to secure this crowning institutional achievement. Yet, the legislative cornerstone of this ambition—the National Sports Governance Act (NSGA), 2025—threatens to kill the bid before it even clears the first hurdle.
By centralising appointment powers for the National Sports Board (NSB) and Tribunal (NST) within the Executive, the Act creates a fatal contradiction. It signals reform to the domestic audience while tightening a stranglehold that violates the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) non-negotiable principle of sporting autonomy. This is no academic grievance; the ghost of the 2012 suspension, when the IOC froze India out for government interference, looms large. If Lausanne views the NSGA not as modernisation but as bureaucratic capture, India's 2036 ambitions will be nullified.
The Litigation Bottleneck: Institutionalising Delay
At first glance, the NSGA appears simply to elevate the 2011 Sports Code into statutory law. But while codifying sports administration, the government has simultaneously created a mandatory domestic layer of litigation that athletes must navigate before they can access international justice. This is not a pathway to redress; it is a bottleneck designed to run out the clock.
We have already witnessed the devastating efficacy of this bureaucratic inertia in Amar Muralidharan v. NADA. Due to systemic lethargy within India's domestic anti-doping panels, a final decision on Muralidharan's suspension was not reached until nearly four years after the alleged violation. By the time the case reached the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, the swimmer had already served the entirety of his two-year ban. While the CAS acknowledged that India's domestic bodies had violated the athlete's right to a timely hearing, it could only offer a de novo review after the fact. For Muralidharan, the delay itself was the punishment, rendering the eventual "justice" moot.
While Section 25 of the NSGA nominally allows for CAS appeals, it locks athletes into a mandatory domestic loop first. As emphasised by the European Court of Justice in the landmark International Skating Union ruling, judicial review mechanisms must account for the reality that a professional athlete's career "may be especially short". A legal battle stretching three to four years does not merely delay a career; it ends it. Under CAS jurisprudence, athletes must exhaust these 'internal remedies' before approaching Lausanne. By forcing athletes to exhaust these protracted domestic remedies, the NSGA ensures that by the time an Indian athlete is legally permitted to knock on the doors of the CAS, their prime competitive years have likely expired.
State Control vs. The Olympic Charter
Even if an athlete survives the procedural bottleneck of the Supreme Court, the governance structure awaiting them remains fundamentally incompatible with the Olympic Charter. Under Section 10 of the NSGA, the newly created NSB is empowered to suspend or cancel the recognition of any National Sports Body—including the Indian Olympic Association—for violations of the Act.
While the government may frame this as prudent oversight, the IOC views it as an existential threat. Rule 27 of the Olympic Charter explicitly mandates that National Olympic Committees (NOCs) must resist all "legal, religious or political pressures" that prevent compliance with the Charter. By granting a state-appointed Board the statutory power to effectively decapitate a sports federation, the Act creates the precise mechanism of "government interference" that triggered India's suspension in 2012.
Importantly, the regulator's "independence" is a fiction. The NSB's members are appointed by the Central Government, and under Section 35, the government retains the power to issue binding directions to the Board on questions of policy. The rot extends to the Tribunal as well. The NST, ostensibly a judicial body, is staffed based on recommendations from a Search and Selection Committee dominated by government secretaries under Section 17. This creates a closed loop where the Executive acts as the prosecutor, the regulator, and the gatekeeper of the appeals process—a structure that would be summarily rejected by Lausanne.
The Way Forward
The clock is ticking. If New Delhi fails to amend the appointment protocols and the suspension powers under Section 10 before the Rules are notified—realistically by January 2026—the governance structure will remain constitutionally incompatible with the Olympic Charter.
If India aspires to lead the Global South in sports governance, it cannot simply mimic the forced arbitration models that European courts are currently dismantling. Instead, the government must sever the executive tether binding the NST. The statutory power to unilaterally suspend the NOC must be scrapped. The NST cannot function as a bureaucratic hurdle; it must be streamlined to provide immediate, interim relief that commands international respect.
We have a narrow window until the notification of the Rules to correct this course. If we fail to institutionalise true independence and efficiency, the dream of Ahmedabad 2036 will be extinguished not by foreign competition, but by our own legislative hubris.
The Author Is An LL.B. Candidate and legal researcher at Leiden University (Netherlands), specialising in International Sports Law
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