Is this the era of Indian sports?

NEW DELHI, India — Indian athletes outside cricket have long been ignored, underfunded and, yes, undernourished in this cricket-mad country. But as the cricket team tops international rankings and comes in as a favorite to win the World Cup next month, the historical also-rans are finally carving out a piece of the pie.

"People used to ignore boxing as a sport," said Akhil Kumar, a top pugilist whose boxing fame won him a spot on "Jhalak Dikhla Ja,"a "Dancing with the Stars" clone that airs on India's Sony Entertainment Television. "Today boxing is respected and I have a status and get respect."

Traditionally, the Indian middle class discouraged its children from playing sports — with good reason. Though success in the Soviet-style sports system could provide a leg up in the cut-throat competition for jobs with the police, the railways, the state-owned oil and steel companies, there was precious little money in the game, and most people viewed sports as a distraction from the serious business of studying.

But with India's economic rise, people are beginning to take interest in new forms of entertainment and young people from small towns and villages — where parents are less rigidly oriented toward studies — are developing a new confidence.

Kumar's teammate Vijender Singh — a small town kid with Bollywood looks — won Indian boxing's first Olympic medal in Beijing in 2008. He then inked a ground-breaking deal with Percept Talent Management that set the stage for athletes outside of cricket to tap into the mushrooming opportunities in advertising and product endorsement.

Late last year, Singh signed his first big endorsement contract to promote Vencobb chicken for the country's poultry association — even as Percept signed four of his teammates to representation contracts. This year, the company will promote a series of televised "Fight Nights" that pit India's top boxers against international fighters in a hybrid of the amateur and professional game that promises to take the sport out of dingy, state-run stadiums.

Meanwhile, the money is beginning to roll in for all sports. In 2006, steel magnate Laxmi Mittal formed the Mittal Champions Trust, seeded with $9 million, to support athletes in squash, badminton, archery, boxing, shooting sports, swimming and heptathlon in their quest for gold at the London Olympics in 2012.

The pace picked up last year, when Jindal Steel (part of the $12 billion Jindal Group) agreed to build stadiums in Bangalore and Kolkata for the All India Football Federation (AIFF) at a reported cost of some $50 million. The $7 billion Mahindra Group partnered with America's National Basketball Association (NBA) to start a new Indian league, and Mukesh Ambani's $50 billion behemoth Reliance Industries formed a joint venture with international sporting giant IMG Worldwide to nurture and promote Indian athletes — and Indian professional leagues.

"Whilst cricket will continue to dominate, at least in the short-term, there's an appetite for a wider choice," said Andrew Wildblood, the IMG executive vice president responsible for the India venture. "We think if we can improve the quality of the sports product and the spectator experience and attract or put in place processes that identify better players sooner and give them the structure to develop we can create assets that will have value."

To start that process, IMG Reliance has already signed a 30-year partnership with the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) to develop basketball from youth leagues to professional teams, and acquired full commercial rights for everything from advertising to franchising for the period of the deal. Similarly, the venture has inked a 15-year deal with the AIFF to restructure, develop and promote the country's club and professional soccer leagues — also acquiring all the commercial rights to the sport in India.

IMG's inspiration was the dramatic success of the Indian Premier League — a domestic cricket league with teams comprising international and domestic players that in three years of operation has already matured into a $4 billion sporting giant — says Wildblood, who was instrumental in IPL's design. But the company has also learned lessons from less successful ventures like the Premier Hockey League, which was shuttered in 2008 after a matching three years of operation. From the two models, IMG Reliance determined that there is money to be made, but a long-term plan is essential for expanding outside of cricket.

"One of the lessons we learned again from IPL," Wildblood says, "was that if you get the sporting offering right, then everything else follows. The most dangerous thing to do is start with the commercials and work backwards to the sport."

India's improved performance in the Beijing Olympics, closely followed by a strong showing at the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi and Asian Games in Guangzhou last year, has provided additional momentum. India performed better than ever at the most recent Asian Games, winning 64 medals, including a record 14 golds, and at the Commonwealth Games India won 101 medals, behind only Australia and England. Not coincidentally, this year the body responsible for setting the curriculum at elementary and high schools has also made sports and physical education mandatory, suggesting India may finally start to live up to its potential.

"We're talking about a country of 1.2 billion people," said Wildblood. "India has an enormous talent pool. What it doesn't have is the structure through which that talent can be identified and given an opportunity to develop."

That's why everybody is looking for India's missing Yao Ming. Major League Baseball's Pittsburgh Pirates offered javelin throwers Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel a shot at pitching in the bigs in 2008 after Singh won an all India "Million Dollar Arm" contest sponsored by Barry Bonds' agent. And IMG has brought 16 young soccer players, five tennis players and eight basketball players to the Bradenton Center in Florida for training. But the biggest buzz is for the Punjab's Satnam Singh Bhamra — a 14-year-old basketball prodigy who already stands more than 7 feet tall.