A sporting social entrepreneurship

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Call it social engineering to achieve sporting excellence or sporting engineering to achieve a social excellence. Olympic Gold Quest is an effort that seeks to change the way India plays. Started by two of India sporting greats, Geeth Sethi and Prakash Padukone, the Quest has now given the country some notable achievers in various sports.

The session, “Going for Gold” TiE Entrepreneurial Summit 2010, focussed on this  sporting social entrepreneurship. Quest's approach is simple. It picks up promising youngsters and grooms them to excel in sports. It provides training in the chosen sports, good education and complete sporting equipment. It’s focus is to provide equal opportunity to not-so-privileged and hence most of its pupils are from economically weaker sections.

This has not stopped Quest’s pupils such as Marikom, Gagan Narang, Sajay Koltay to break the barrier and make a mark in the national and international sporting arena.

Quest is a not-for-profit organization and it sustains itself through corporate sponsorship. The Quest team consists of Viswanathan Anand, Leander Paes, Niraj Bajaj, R Ramaraj, Shitin Desai,  Rakesh Khanna, Neeraj Bharadwaj, and Viren Rasquinha along with Geeth and Padukone in this social venture.

Quest focuses on six sporting disciplines: boxing, badminton, wresting, archery, athletics and shooting.