How Zawar Turned Into New Breeding Ground Of Football Talent In India

Year 2010, an 11-year-old boy sneaks out of his bed at midnight and excitedly switches on the TV to see Spain defeating Netherlands 1-0 and clinching the FIFA World Cup title. Four years later, the boy saw Germany thrashing Argentina in the summit clash and being crowned as the World Champions. Years passed by but this beautiful sequence of following this quadrennial event still continues. However, one thing that the boy always laments is not seeing his own country, India perform in the biggest sporting event in the world.

In today's time, it won't be wrong to say that Indian sports department is heavily dominated by men's cricket, seeing it's vast popularity. However, there are millions of hearts in India who still beat for football. Whenever we think about India's participation in the FIFA World Cup, the first question that pops up in everyone's mind in regarding the investment in the grassroots.

Speaking of the grassroots, Rajasthan's Udaipur is gradually becoming a new hub of Indian football and Hindustan Zinc Limited are working round the clock for the same.

"Desh ka sapna, goal hai apna (Country's dream is our goal)"- moving ahead with this tagline, Hindustan Zinc Limited have set up the Zinc Football Academy in Zawar, a place located 40kms away from Udaipur.

Established in 2017, Zinc Football is part of Hindustan Zinc's social initiative - Vedanta Zinc Football & Sports Foundation. It follows a student-athlete model and lays special emphasis on providing an opportunity to children to play a large number of competitive matches so that they can get enough competition exposure and one day go on to represent the state or the national team.

"The whole idea behind all this is to produce better citizens for the country through sports. We do believe that sports can shape up the character of a person. Football is a very popular in India and the rest of the world and it is easily accessible by all. We provide school education in parallel to the football training, so that some of them will become professional footballers but some of them will surely become good citizens with academic records," Arun Misra, CEO & Whole-time Director - Hindustan Zinc told NDTV.

Started in 2017, the Zinc academy also showed tremendous results as their student Sahil Poonia represented India in SAAF Under-17 Championship in Colombo, where he bagged the Best Goalkeeper award. In 2023, he also earned the contract from Indian Super League Club, Bengaluru FC.

Apart from Poonia, defender Mohammed Kaif was another player from ZFA to represent India and become first player from Rajasthan in 40 years to play for the national team.

Kaif was the part of the Indian team which won the 2023 SAFF U-16 Championship and 2024 SAFF U-17 Championship.

Not only this, ZFA has also played a pivotal role in empowering the community girls and helping them find a future in football.

"A very less number of girls could participate at such level. We have made such arrangements for them, so that they can have a safer environment and play freely. Some girls are slowly reaching the district and state level, so definitely the future looks bright," said Chandrakala Rao, coach U-13.

Seeing all this development, it won't be wrong to say that developing of such academies at grassroots level can surely take Indian football to greater heights.