SBI Foundation partners with IIS to back 40 Indian track and field athletes

SBI Foundation has partnered with the Inspire Institute of Sport (IIS) to support 40 Indian track and field athletes, in a move that adds institutional philanthropic funding to the country’s high-performance athletics ecosystem.

The partnership will combine SBI Foundation’s support with IIS’s existing coaching and sports-science infrastructure at its high-performance centre in Karnataka. Founded by the JSW Group, IIS provides athletes with coaching, sports science, nutrition, strength and conditioning, rehabilitation and other performance services.

The collaboration comes as India’s sports ecosystem increasingly looks beyond individual sponsorships and event-led funding towards longer-term investment in athlete development.

IIS’s track and field programme currently includes athletes such as Avinash Sable, Parul Chaudhary, Praveen Chithravel, Tejaswin Shankar and Muhammed Ajmal, among others.

Building the performance pipeline

A key feature of the partnership is its focus on 40 athletes, rather than being built around a single established name.

For high-performance sport, funding needs to extend beyond competition and cover areas such as coaching, equipment, sports science, nutrition, recovery, rehabilitation and performance analysis. IIS has built an integrated system around these services, providing a platform through which institutional funding can be directed towards athlete development.

Its sports-science programme includes applied sports psychology, exercise nutrition, metabolism, sleep research, sports medicine and rehabilitation.

For SBI Foundation, the partnership creates a defined athlete-development programme through an established high-performance institution. For IIS, it brings another institutional funding partner into an ecosystem that requires sustained investment to develop athletes over multiple years.

A changing sports funding landscape

The partnership also reflects the expanding role of corporate and philanthropic capital in Indian Olympic sport.

While government programmes remain a major source of funding for elite athletes, private organisations have increasingly invested in training infrastructure, sports science and athlete development. IIS itself is part of that broader shift, with the JSW Group-backed institute built around a long-term high-performance model.

Rather than funding a specific competition or individual athlete, the SBI Foundation-IIS partnership is focused on developing a wider cohort. That approach could help address one of the persistent challenges for Indian athletics: creating greater depth behind its established international performers.

IIS has positioned its wider network of high-performance and satellite centres around long-term athlete development and improving India’s Olympic and Paralympic prospects.

The partnership with SBI Foundation adds another layer to that model, bringing institutional philanthropic funding into the development of 40 track and field athletes and highlighting the growing role of non-government capital in India’s high-performance sports ecosystem.