Transstadia to host India International Sports Summit in 2010

Transstadia, a sports and entertainment company, which had, earlier in the year, indicated that they would be investing in developing sports infrastructure in the country, has announced that they will be hosting the India International Sports Summit in March 2010, a first of its kind platform for professionals in the sports ecosystem to meet, debate and discuss key issues related towards building the sports industry in India. To be held from March 24 to 25, the theme of the event is ‘India, get, set, go.’

The summit will focus on various areas of sports including sports infrastructure development, grassroots initiatives in the area of sports, developing sports talent from all parts of the country among others.

Udit Sheth, CEO, Transstadia said, “This summit is a first step towrads propelling India ahead of as a sporting nation. For this, sport needs to be scalable, sustainable, and profitable and access to training, coaching and sporting facilities for the common man is important. We need to work on building greater expertise and knowledge which will facilitate in producing champions. At the same time, rewards for sportspersons should be greater so that it becomes a career, rather than a past time. Corporates have traditionally also sought to adopt sports in a piece meal manner. The need is to professionalise sport, incorporating in the system managers who can market sports initiatives, and potential sponsors who believe in the long term benefits of investing in this arena. With the India International Sports Summit, we can make that first step in this direction.”

The company had also hired Sumeet Chatterjee from Pickle to head business development in July this year. At the time, Chatterjee had told Campaign India that he had joined Transstadia as it was an opportunity to create a new sports eco-system in India. Speaking to Campaign India at the event, Chatterjee, senior VP, business development, Transstadia said, “Transstadia is going to come up with multi-purpose stadiums. We will also need to increase the capacity utilisation of these stadia, one needs to stretch the asset to the maximum. This is, in our mind, a nascent area in India. The government has been coming up with the infrastructure, but now through the summit, we are trying to get in all the stakeholders of the sporting eco-system together. That includes sportsmen, the media, federations, governement bureacracy, corporate India, who can come together under one roof for two days to discuss the various challenges and opportunities which lie in the business of sports, and make sports a sustainable and profitable business; that is the broad objective. At the same time, we want the summit to become the voice of the sports industry in India.”

The multi-purpose stadia are being proposed as public-private partnerships, where corporates can get in from the start, to build their association with sports. 

Picture caption: (left to right: Vijender Singh - boxing champion, Tessa Sanderson - Olympic Gold Medalist UK and Udit Sheth - managing director and CEO, SE TransStadia.)