Bengaluru, May 21 -- Over the next couple of years, the Sports Authority of India plans to build a sports stack that will make athlete data accessible to start-ups and innovators, Hari Ranjan Rao, secretary, Department of Sports, Government of India, said at the RCB Innovation Lab Indian sports summit in Bengaluru on Tuesday. "We have set up a database called National Sports Repository System in the Sports Authority of India. What we plan to do now is that create a sports stack like UPI and then make the data available to start-ups and innovators so that the data of millions of sports persons can be used for coming up with interesting solutions and that should be possible now beyond cricket. We are now planning to do this in next two to three years and then I think that will open up a completely new segment of innovation." "We are working with Anusandhan National Research Foundation for doing a deep research on Indian genotype and specifically area-specific biomechanics and their studies. The data for such things was not available in India," he said in the 'India at play: Building a sports-forward nation' session. Back in 1986, the department of youth affairs and sports under the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government launched the Special Area Games Programme to identify and scout talent from rural, coastal, hilly and tribal populations based on their genetic talent or geographic advantage. The programme was discontinued in the early 90s. Asian Games medalist boxer Dingko Singh and archer Limba Ram, who featured in three Olympic Games, were scouted through the programme. Calling the lack of "trained manpower," among the biggest challenges in the Indian sporting ecosystem, Rao said: "Whether in terms of coaching, sports scientists, sports administrators, we lack trained manpower. We are the most populous country in the world so we cannot go around and ask anybody else for help. We need to re-skill, skill, train our people in these areas and have a large number of people who can take over the roles." "Sports science is an area where we have been really lagging behind. We're trying to do whatever little we can by setting up more and more sports science centers, and also trying to keep a record of every athlete who is part of the SAI ecosystem, around 8000-9000 of them. The National Sports Repository System is trying to capture data of all these athletes who are part of the ecosystem. Going forward, ideally speaking any child who gets into the sporting ecosystem, his sports science and his basic parameters of body composition, among other things must get captured and must remain part of a system where it can be studied and it can help the child develop." "We intend to conduct talent identification using AI mobile based devices so that in school itself children with basic talent and basic physiology can be identified and be part of a common database from where experts can select them. This will require more support from R&D and innovation but I don't see any challenge in that because India has very good capacity in doing that. We need to just put that system in place hopefully in the next three years and should see much better results in this area."...