On 18 June 2026, a Department of Public Enterprises office memorandum did something small on paper and large in effect: it named "Development of Sporting Activities" a Common CSR Theme for the financial years 2026-27 and 2027-28. Sport had always been eligible for corporate social responsibility spending under Schedule VII of the Companies Act; it had never been prioritised. Now it is — with named intervention areas: sports infrastructure, equipment, professional coaching, the promotion of sport, and the nurturing of sportspersons.
The mechanism matters. India's Central Public Sector Enterprises are guided to direct a large share of their CSR — the common-theme framework has long pointed to around 60 per cent — toward notified priorities. For two financial years, sport is on that list. In plain terms: there is now a pool of public-sector money whose officers are actively looking for credible sports projects to fund.
Here is the fork in the road. The easy way to spend CSR on sport is to buy things you can photograph — kits, a one-day tournament, a banner. It is spent, it is seen, and it is gone. The other way is to buy the things that compound: coaching, pathways, systems — the unglamorous machinery that turns raw talent into athletes for a decade, not a news cycle. The DPE's own intervention areas — "professional coaching", "nurturing sportspersons" — point squarely at the second way.
And the second way is precisely where the France–India bridge earns its place in a CSR plan. The intervention areas read like a description of what IFSA already carries across that bridge: French coaching method and academy pathways (our work with Olympique Lyonnais and LOSC Lille), the student-athlete route that keeps a diploma and a sport together, para expertise aligned with the new Para Élan programme, and the tournament — the Indo-French Football Tournament — that puts French and Indian youth on the same pitch. A rupee of CSR spent on a Franco-Indian programme does not buy a photo-op; it buys a transfer of method from a country that has spent forty years perfecting it.
So the suggestion, plainly, to a CPSE CSR officer with sport newly on the list and a two-year window to use it: fund the pathway, not the photo. Back the programmes that build coaches and systems — and pick the ones with a partner on the other end who can supply the method India is still building. That is not a call to spend more. It is a call to spend the same money on the thing that lasts.
The money has arrived. The only question is whether it builds a banner or a bridge.
