If there is one sector in India that has witnessed visible, drastic change in the 21st century, it has to be that of sports. Consider this- at the turn of the century, India was considered as a one-sport nation, namely, a cricketing nation. Even in cricket, India was for most part, an “alsoran”. If you were to read any media coverage of India’s sports sector in the 90s and the early 2000s, you would notice an oft-repeated lament that Cricket in India grabbed all the eyeballs and investments, and all other sports were in a state of poverty. While much of the lament was true then, the narrative has been changing slowly, yet progressively over the last 25 years.

This White Paper explores how such multi-stakeholder collaboration, matching and funding can happen. In answering the “how”, we have discussed various blended finance approaches case studies derived from their deployment in other social sectors, which could be adapted and deployed for raising funding within the sporting ecosystem, be it for building sporting infrastructure or for developing community sport or for achieving Olympic/Paralympic glory. Within the Indian context, the advent of the Social Stock Exchange provides for yet another exciting social financing mechanism to be explored in the days ahead. We also provide two recent example of Social Stock Exchange listings for readers to assess this platform’s potential.