Decadence of Indian Badminton

There has been a perceptible decline in the Indian badminton for the past one and a half years. It was a sport which India had dominated and can best be summed up by the sterling performances of Saina Nehwal and PV Sindhu who won three medals between them (1 silver and 2 bronze) in three successive Olympics (2012, 2016 and 2020). Last year’s Paris Olympics happened to the first time that the Indian shuttlers returned without a medal. Just when one thought that it was a blip, further proof of the rapid decline came in the form of the Indian shuttlers not winning a single major tournament in 2024--- something which has not happened since 2015. 

It must be mentioned here that Indian badminton has been perched on the top with the high point coming when PV Sindhu won gold medal in the 2019 World Championship and male shuttler Kidambi Srikanth following it up with the silver medal in 2021 edition. Even in team events, Indian shuttlers have broken the glass ceiling--- becoming the first country outside the Top 4 (Indonesia, China, Malaysia and Japan) to annex the Thomas Cup World Team Championships in 2022—a red letter day for Indian badminton, without a doubt this was the High Noon of success of Indian shuttlers. They had firmly established themselves as one of the top badminton powerhouses in the world. 

Apart from this, the Indian shuttlers were consistently winning tournaments across the world all … Sample this—In 2021 alone Indian shuttlers men and women won a total of nine tournaments. This was very significant when viewed in the light of the fact that the only Chinese shuttlers had won more titles in that year. 

FIRST DRAFT spoke to a cross section of former players, and leading coaches in an attempt to decipher as to the reasons for the rapid decline of Indian badminton.

Singles have always been the forte of Indian players. Historically also, we had Prakash Padukone and Gopi Chand both of whom won the All-England titles in 1980 and 2000 respectively. A cursory look at the international rankings of the players in 2021 and 2022 illustrate this. We had the likes of Lakshya Sen, HS Prannoy, ranked World no, 10 and 12 respectively, while PV Sindhu was ranked No.8 in the world. There has been a drastic decline to that with both Lakshya and Prannoy ranked outside the top 20 and Sindhu languishing at 28.

For Uday Pawar a former international singles shuttler and one of the leading coaches it seems that the depletion of singles talent is linked to a slight shift in the priorities of coaching. He feels nowadays more focus and attention is given on improving the doubles standards.

“For me the biggest reason why the India has witnessed a steep decline is that our focus is a bit off our singles players, in a way, we sort of took it granted that the Indian system inherently produces fine singles players. I am saying this from experience... Previously, I had parents coming to me specially asking me to train their children for singles. For the last five years., there has a marked shift towards horning their expertise in doubles. I cannot lay my finger on this change of attitude, but it seems more of a gamble—if the ward fails to build a career in singles, then doubles is also there,” said Uday.   

Uday’s astute observation is borne out by a cursory glance at the ranking of our doubles players, we have a slew of Indian tandems who are now much higher ranked than ever before. Sample this----our top men’s doubles combine of Satwik and Chirag are ranked 11^th, Gayatri Gopi Chand and Teresa Jolly (women’s doubles) ranked No. 10 and mixed doubles team of Tanisha Crasto and Dhruv Kapila ranked 17. So, these three doubles pairs have better ranking than our leading singles players--- something of a tectonic shift in Indian badminton. 

“I cannot recollect the last time our doubles combinations did better than the singles players. Traditionally India has been a reservoir of good singles players and doubles was doing the catch up… So, let’s say in a team event like Thomas Cup in which there are 3 singles and two doubles, it was our singles players who spearhead and were instrumental in shaping our wins. There doubles players were always playing second fiddle. Now they have started overshadowing our singles players,” said Uday.     

Another reason is that the young talents like Lakshya, Priyanshu Rajwat, Kiran George have not been able to realise their potential, feels former player Sushant Bora. He feels that the current crop of Indian youngsters has not been able to fully realise their potential. “Unlike their predecessors, like Srikanth, Prannoy, who were able to successfully make the transition from the junior to senior ranks, the current crop has failed to do it.” said Sushant Bora.    

Of all the youngsters it was Lakshya who had proved to a big disappointment. “Lakshya in particular had shown great promise early on --- winning the bronze medal at the World Championships (2021). Commonwealth Games Gold medal (2022) _and a member of the Indian team which won the Thomas Cup World Team Championships (2022) and also was the silver medal in the Asian Games in 2023, losing to world champions China. But ever since the Paris Olympics his performances have dipped considerably. The fact that he had to battle injuries has also not helped his cause,” said a Ravish Sethi, a former official of the Badminton Association of India (BAI).

The punishing international schedule has also been blamed for the poor performance of the Indian shuttlers, feels Vimal Kumar, Lakshya Sen’s coach.  It’s almost non-stop tournament week after week at the highest level in the Badminton World Federation (BWF) circuit. “The problem with badminton is unlike tennis when an injured player can pull out or withdraw from a tournament once it gets underway, in badminton the leading players are punished by the world body (they deduct ranking points) if they have a minor injury and pull out. So it happens that players who are carrying injuries minor have to play till the tournament ends. So, it results in players aggravating injuries--- something which has happened in Lakshya’s case.  In 2024 Lakshya was playing with in the Singapore Open with a mild knee injury.     

Normally, Lakshya would have pulled out of the next tournament which happened to be the Indonesian Open, but since the Paris Olympics were scheduled to be held a year later, it was an Olympic qualification year and was imperative on all players to play as many tournaments in order to accumulate maximum points. This forced him to play in 5 tournaments and thus aggravated his right knee. This was to hamper his performance in the latter parts of 2024 and 2025 in which he failed to win a single international title,” said Vimal.  

As regards women, it is very disturbing that there is no player anywhere in the horizon who can step into PV Sindhu’s steps.  Sindhu’s performances === gold, silver and 4 bronze medals at the World Championships is unprecedented, apart from this she has won silver at the Rio Olympics in 2016 ===which is the best performance ever by an Indian shuttler at the Summer Games.   

But Sindhu has not been the player she was ever since she suffered a major knee injury two years ago, not only did she take almost 7 months to step into the court after this, but her game has yet to attain the sharpness and top gear, “Now aged 29. I don’t think she can make a big comeback back as the peak performance for a shuttler is between 22 to 26. So, India will have to go on the assumption that Sindhu’s best is behind her and we have not got a replacement for her, now when Saina Nehwal’s game was declining, you had a young Sindhu who was making all the waves. Unfortunately, Sindhu’s decline is a very big blow to Indian badminton, “opined for BAI secretary general SS Mani.