Khelo India was launched in 2018 by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports as a national programme for the development of sports, built around talent identification at the school and university level, playfield development, community coaching and the filling of critical gaps in sports infrastructure. The Khelo India School Games, first staged in New Delhi in 2018, grew into a family of competitions covering school, university, winter and para athletes, and more than 63,000 athletes have taken part since inception. Assistance to National Sports Federations is the separate, older channel through which the government funds the federations that actually select and prepare national teams — paying for coaching camps, equipment and travel to international events.

The scale of the outlay marks a shift from treating sport as a welfare or youth-affairs line item to treating it as a medal-producing pipeline with a deadline. India will host the centenary Commonwealth Games at Amdavad in 2030 — confirmed by the Commonwealth Sport General Assembly at Glasgow on 26 November 2025 — and is bidding to host the 2036 Olympic Games. A five-year funding cycle running to 2030-31 aligns almost exactly with the preparation window for those Games. The separate Rs 7,387 crore for federations also matters institutionally: National Sports Federations have long been criticised for weak governance, and larger central funding strengthens the government's leverage over how they are run.