NEW DELHI: Somewhere on a muddy school field in Haryana right now, a teenager is perhaps drilling the same throwing technique over and over, just as she had watched on television just days ago. Her sole aim is to pull off the one like Sharmila Dhankar, India’s Commonwealth Games shot put gold medallist.Before the 2026 CWG campaign, she, like many of us, had almost certainly never heard the name. And it’s not because Dhankar had not won anything before the Glasgow Games; she had, a gold medal in the Women’s Shot Put F57 event at the 2026 Fazza International Para Athletics Championship, but because one of the primary institutions whose entire job was to carry that story back from the medal podium to villages and training grounds across the state has, for all practical purposes, gone quiet.That’s the part of this story that rarely gets told. India walked away from Glasgow with 39 medals, and for a week, the athletes who won them were everywhere, garlanded at airports, seated beside ministers, their faces on the evening news. But medals don’t build the next generation of athletes by themselves. Somebody has to keep telling their stories, long after the felicitation photo is filed away, to the kid training in a dusty school ground who needs proof that this path actually leads somewhere.
Medal tally of India’s athletes by birth state/UT
We wanted to know which state sports departments are still doing their job of promoting the sports and their grassroots on their social media platforms, and which ones seem to have simply logged off. So we scrolled through the timelines ourselves. Here’s what we found.
Haryana: Hit on the podium, not so much off it
No state produced more glory in Glasgow than Haryana. Eleven medallists, including seven gold, two silver, two bronze, spanning boxing, wrestling, athletics, and para sport, headlined by a Neeraj Chopra silver that will be replayed on sports channels for years.Alongside him were names most of India still had little knowledge of. The likes of Preeti Pawar, Jaismine Lamboria, Sakshi Chaudhary, Priya Ghanghas, Sachin Siwach, and Ankush Panghal, all of whom trained in government facilities, under government schemes, and who’d probably appreciate their own state department cheering as loudly for them as it does for its concert lineups.Because that’s the thing. The Sports Department, Government of Haryana’s X account has posted exactly once in all of 2026, and it’s a flyer for the music acts playing at the Chief Minister’s Cup.Facebook and Instagram follow a similar rhythm with a short cluster of posts around that February event, and then not much else.Eleven medals, and not one dedicated post to show for it. Somewhere in Rohtak or Bhiwani, a young pugilist training in Priya Ghanghas’s discipline would probably just like a little proof that someone up top is paying attention.
Manipur still talking about 2023
Manipur’s page has an odd time-capsule quality to it. This is the state that gave India Mirabai Chanu, one of the country’s most beloved Olympic medalists, and this Commonwealth Games alone produced four medalists from Manipur, Chanu’s gold among them, alongside Rishikanta Singh, Bindyarani Devi, and Jadumani Singh.And yet the Department of Youth Affairs & Sports’ X account hasn’t posted since October 2023, a “Run for Unity” event, frozen well before any of this year’s medals happened.Although the Facebook page has had a few sporadic posts here and there this year, its Instagram account has managed just two posts since January. It’s the kind of gap that makes you wonder if someone simply forgot the login details somewhere along the way.
Rajasthan: 14 years and counting
If there’s one number in this whole exercise worth sitting with, it’s this: the official Sports Department, Government of Rajasthan hasn’t posted on Facebook since April 14, 2012.Fourteen years, through Arundhati Choudhary’s Commonwealth gold and everything else that’s happened in Rajasthan sport since.Its X account’s last original post predates a retweet from March 2021, and there’s no Instagram at all. A parallel handle, the Rajasthan State Sports Council, exists across all three platforms and is barely livelier.Somewhere behind Choudhary’s medal is a genuinely good story, but it just hasn’t found a home on the one page built to tell it.
Uttar Pradesh and Delhi carry the same gloomy picture
Gulveer Singh managed both a silver and a bronze for Uttar Pradesh this Games, a rare double that would make a great centrepiece for the state’s sporting year. Instead, across two separate official handles on three platforms, Uttar Pradesh Sports has produced little beyond reposts, while its sister account, Sports Directorate, Govt of Uttar Pradesh, hasn’t posted at all in 2026.Delhi Government, for its part, doesn’t run a dedicated sports account at all on any of the popular social media platforms, so gold medalist Harsh Singh and bronze medalist Tejaswin Shankar, both representing India’s capital, don’t really have an institutional cheerleader online, their wins quietly absorbed into the general churn of city government updates. Both athletes are, in effect, doing their own promotional legwork.
And then come Tamil Nadu and others
Set against all that quiet, Tamil Nadu feels like a different sport altogether. Its Sports Tamil Nadu handles post multiple times a day, celebrating not just its own three medalists, Praveen Chithravel, Selva Prabhu, Muthupandi Raja, but athletes from other states too, weaving in government scheme updates without it ever reading like bureaucracy.Every medallist got a dedicated post. Somewhere in Tamil Nadu, a kid training in long jump or wrestling doesn’t have to wonder whether the sport leads anywhere. The state tells them, publicly, almost daily.Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka’s Facebook and Instagram pages, Assam, Bihar, and Tripura all follow a version of that same habit, active, consistent, generous with attention toward athletes nobody outside their district would otherwise know existed.Kerala doesn’t run a separate sports handle on X but keeps its Facebook and Instagram genuinely lively, making sure Murali Sreeshankar and Mohammed Basil’s silvers got their due.Andhra Pradesh mirrors that same rhythm across all three platforms.
The ones somewhere in the middle
Not every state falls neatly into being inactive or staying proactive. Punjab’s account managed just two posts on X all year, New Year’s and Republic Day, though its Facebook and Instagram carry a bit more life around coaching and departmental meetings, even if athletes rarely get top billing.Uttarakhand was genuinely active last year before cooling off in 2026, leaning more toward government scheme announcements on Facebook, though its Instagram at least carried two posts around the Games.
How active are states/UTs with CWG medallists in promoting sport
Maharashtra has dedicated posts up for both Sarvesh Kushare and Dilip Gavit, with Instagram staying fairly regular, enough effort to stay out of the quiet column.Karnataka’s X account hasn’t posted since March 2024, around an unrelated cultural-team event, even though its Facebook and Instagram have stayed warm and active toward its CWG medalists.
Does it matter so much?
It is worth asking why this actually matters, beyond good manners. Well, a state sports department’s social media feed isn’t just a courtesy board for congratulations; it’s one of the cheapest, most direct tools available to build the next generation of athletes.A youngster in a small town is far more likely to pick up a javelin because they saw a state government post celebrating someone from their own district. Even when it comes to promoting any government policy, social media can be as effective.Visibility drives aspiration. There’s a funding logic too. Sponsors, corporates, and even state finance departments allocate resources partly based on visible public interest, and a well-run social account is often the easiest evidence a sport has that interest.ALSO READ: Anahat Singh: What is in the name? A word from Guru Nanak’s prayer, now India’s squash sensationSilence, on the other hand, sends the message that grassroots sport isn’t a priority worth the effort of a single post, even when the state has just produced a medallist on the world stage.
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It is worth it because sometimes, the first step towards building a sporting culture is simply showing people that their achievements are being seen.
