Chess
How India tripled its Grandmaster count in the past one decade
Up until 2010, India had a total of 23 GMs – a number which has seen a massive jump to 72 from 2011 to 2021.
Viswanathan Anand with Nihal Sarin and R Praggnanandhaa (Source: ANI)
In the past three days, the Indian chess fraternity added two more names to their ever-growing list of Grandmasters (GMs) with Sankalp Gupta and Mitrabha Guha surpassing all the three required norms to become India's 71st and 72nd GM respectively.
While this number is a pale shadow of the total Grandmasters produced by the likes of Russia and the United States of America (USA), India is slowly but steadily rising up the ladder.
Even though chess has seen a huge boom in India ever since the Covid-19 pandemic struck in March last year, what was the status of the strategy sport before that?
While many attribute the rise of chess in India solely to the boon during the pandemic, the fact remains that chess has been on a rise in the country for over a decade.
This can be proven by the fact that India has more than tripled its Grandmaster count in the last decade from 2011 to 2021.
Up until 2010, India had a total of 23 GMs – a number which has seen a massive jump to 72 from 2011 to 2021.
To put things into perspective, India's first GM Viswanathan Anand earned that tag in the year 1988. In 22 years since then until 2010, the country saw the rise of 22 more GMs including a female Grandmaster in Koneru Humpy.
Ever since then, India has produced chess GMs at will. Starting from 2011 to 9th November 2021, a total of 49 grandmasters have emerged out of India. Now that's an enormous number for a decade.
While India saw a total of six players achieving the GM title in 2013, it further gained pace towards 2018 and 2019 as the country produced eight and seven GMs respectively then.
In the three years between 2018 to 9th November 2021, India has produced a total of 22 Grandmasters. This is just one short of equaling the total they had from 1988 to 2010. Unreal, right?
List of Indian Grandmasters
| Sr. No. | Name | Year of Attaining GM title |
| 1 | Viswanathan Anand | 1988 |
| 2 | Dibyendu Barua | 1991 |
| 3 | Pravin Thipsay | 1997 |
| 4 | Abhijit Kunte | 2000 |
| 5 | K Sasikiran | 2000 |
| 6 | Pentala Harikrishna | 2001 |
| 7 | Koneru Humpy | 2002 |
| 8 | Surya Sekhar Ganguly | 2003 |
| 9 | Sandipan Chanda | 2003 |
| 10 | RB Ramesh | 2004 |
| 11 | Tejas Bakre | 2004 |
| 12 | P Magesh Chandran | 2006 |
| 13 | Deepan Chakravarthy | 2006 |
| 14 | Neelotpal Das | 2006 |
| 15 | Parimarjan Negi | 2006 |
| 16 | GN Gopal | 2007 |
| 17 | Abhijeet Gupta | 2008 |
| 18 | S Arun Prasad | 2008 |
| 19 | S Kidambi | 2009 |
| 20 | RR Laxman | 2009 |
| 21 | Sriram Jha | 2010 |
| 22 | Deep Sengupta | 2010 |
| 23 | B Adhiban | 2010 |
| 24 | SP Sethuraman | 2011 |
| 25 | Harika Dronavalli | 2011 |
| 26 | Lalit Babu | 2012 |
| 27 | Vaibhav Suri | 2012 |
| 28 | MR Venkatesh | 2012 |
| 29 | Sahaj Grover | 2012 |
| 30 | Vidit Gujarathi | 2013 |
| 31 | Shyam Sundar | 2013 |
| 32 | Akshyaraj Kore | 2013 |
| 33 | Vishnu Prasanna | 2013 |
| 34 | Debashis Das | 2013 |
| 35 | Saptarshi Chowdhury | 2013 |
| 36 | Ankit Rajpara | 2014 |
| 37 | Aravindh Chitambaram | 2015 |
| 38 | Karthikeyan Murali | 2015 |
| 39 | Ashwin Jayaram | 2015 |
| 40 | Swapnil Dhopade | 2015 |
| 41 | SL Narayanan | 2015 |
| 42 | Shardul Gagare | 2016 |
| 43 | Diptayan Ghosh | 2016 |
| 44 | Priyadarshan K | 2016 |
| 45 | Aryan Chopra | 2017 |
| 46 | Srinath Narayanan | 2017 |
| 47 | Himanshu Sharma | 2017 |
| 48 | Anurag Mhamal | 2017 |
| 49 | Abhimanyu Puranik | 2017 |
| 50 | Thejkumar MS | 2017 |
| 51 | Saptarshi Roy | 2018 |
| 52 | R Praggnanandhaa | 2018 |
| 53 | Nihal Sarin | 2018 |
| 54 | Erigaisi Arjun | 2018 |
| 55 | Karthik Venkataraman | 2018 |
| 56 | Harsha Bharathakoti | 2018 |
| 57 | P Karthikeyan | 2018 |
| 58 | Stany GA | 2018 |
| 59 | Vikash NR | 2019 |
| 60 | D Gukesh | 2019 |
| 61 | P Iniyan | 2019 |
| 62 | Swayams Mishra | 2019 |
| 63 | Girish Koushik | 2019 |
| 64 | Prithu Gupta | 2019 |
| 65 | Raunak Sadhwani | 2019 |
| 66 | G Akash | 2020 |
| 67 | Leon Mendonca | 2021 |
| 68 | Arjun Kalyan | 2021 |
| 69 | Harshit Raja | 2021 |
| 70 | Raja Rithvik | 2021 |
| 71 | Sankalp Gupta | 2021 |
| 72 | Mitrabha Guha | 2021 |
