Dressed in a red-and-black football jersey and blue shorts, 11-year-old Sanya Kunde glides across the field, effortlessly cutting through the defence line of men much older than her, many of them government officials well into their 50s.
With her teammates failing to match her pace, Sanya has so far failed to convert any of the chances – every failed opportunity ends up with the 11-year-old momentarily bending over, clutching her waist tight, before breaking into a sprint.
It’s 8 am and coach Raees Ahmed is watching from the sidelines of the Bicharpur village football ground in Madhya Pradesh’s Shahdol as the young footballers take on the district’s former national-level players, who now work in the Railways and forest department, for a practice match. Ahmed hopes his young players will one day be part of the Bicharpur A-team and win a national tournament.
The practice match ends in a goalless draw, but Sanya has no time to rest. Barely five minutes later, Sanya begins her second game. This time, it’s a match between two sides of reserve and rookie footballers, all under 17. Sanya, the only girl on the field, is on the defensive line, waiting to strike.
Sanya Kunde (right) with her sister Pihu. Sanya is among Bicharpur’s most promising players, with her coach predicting a prospect for her in future national games. “My dream is to play for Team India,” she says. (Express Photo: Anand Mohan J)
Bicharpur and Shahdol are to Madhya Pradesh what a Kerala or Goa is to India. An unlikely football hub in an unlikely football state, since 2021, the district, which has more than 1,200 football clubs, has produced at least 40 national and state-level players – an achievement that got a nod from Prime Minister, who mentioned Shahdol’s footballing prowess in his Mann ki Baat address on July 30.
During his visit to Shahdol in July, PM Modi had visited met some of its budding footballers, including Sanya, dubbed the district “mini Brazil” and lauded the ‘Football Kranti’ programme now underway in this region.
Sanya is among Bicharpur’s most promising players, with her coach predicting a prospect for her in future national games.
“My uncle was a striker, my father played as goal-keeper in state-level matches. My sisters were national-level players and my whole village plays football. I have played with teams that have defeated Jabalpur, Bhopal and Indore. My dream is to play for the national team and one day play for Team India,” she says.
A PT teacher comes to Bicharpur
Located around 5 km from Shahdol district, Bicharpur is nestled among the Vindhyachal hills in the northeastern part of Madhya Pradesh. While most people work as agricultural workers, growing rice, wheat and soyabean, many others work in Coal India’s mines and the Railways.
The Scheduled Tribes of Gond, Kol and Baiga, among others, make up 74.78% of Bicharpur’s population of around 900. People here mostly live in mud-brick hutments surrounded by towering cactus and bamboo. Most homes have an electricity connection and draw water from hand pumps.
What sets Bicharpur apart, though, is its craze for football, triggered around half a century ago when workers of local coal and railway unions played the game.
Shahdol Divisional Commissioner Rajeev Sharma says, “Football matches were organised by the unions of the railway and coal companies which had the funds to promote several games. While games like hockey were promoted in our neighbouring district of Umaria, in the 1960s and 70s, the unions introduced football in Bicharpur and the larger Shahdol district. The game quickly became a favourite among the tribals and they took to it.”
Ketram Singh Gond, 58, a former defender who played in local tournaments, was among those who were fascinated by what they saw of the sport.
Ketram, who runs a kirana store in the village, says, “We used to watch football games that were held at the local railway ground. That generated a lot of interest. Then, in the 1990s, when only one family in the village owned a television set, people assembled to watch the World Cup. We never had any coaches so we gave up on the game and had to work for a living. If I had a coach. I would have become a good player.”
That’s when Raees Ahmed arrived on the scene. A former national football player who has represented Madhya Pradesh in around seven national games, Ahmed was in 1995 posted as the Physical Training (PT) teacher at the Bicharpur primary school and ended up scripting its football story.
A former national football player, Raees Ahmed’s posting in 2002 as a PT teacher at the Bicharpur school changed the region’s football story forever. (Express Photo: Anand Mohan J)
In his Mann ki Baat, Modi had credited Ahmed with “teaching football to the youth with full dedication” and recognising their talent.
Now “Coach Ahmed”, 43, is the head coach of the Bicharpur football girls’ and boys’ teams and has been honing national-level players since 2002.
Today, watching the practice match between the veterans and the youngsters, Ahmed winces as a forest official, Ram Kumar Baiga, 50, disciplines his players by making them do short sprints before a game.
“This is precisely what I don’t want on my field. Ram is a football fanatic and plays Maradona-style old-school football — dashing into the opponents’ goal line. I can’t stop him from playing his style, but he doesn’t realise that the game has changed, young players need to be tactically sound, not aggressive. I can’t afford my players getting injured – they come from very poor families and can’t be out of the team due to injuries,” he said.
Talking about the spark he saw in Bicharpur, Ahmed says, “I saw that the people here already had a footballing culture and a natural athletic ability. They only needed to learn tactics to become good footballers.”
A football player’s home in Becharpur. (Express Photo: Anand Mohan J)
The first tackle: drugs
Days into his new role, Ahmed hit a wall – the village had a drug problem.
“During the drills, I noticed some players playing under the influence. They did not see anything wrong with it. But before teaching them football, I had to rid them of the drug problem. I decided that I would start with the younger children,” he says.
Additional Director General of Police (Shahdol) D C Sagar, who is a regular on the Shahdol football scene, says, “Most of the tribal youth in the region are addicted to cough syrups, ganja, and intravenous injections and tablets. The challenge was to make football an important lifeline for them.”
Police data on cases registered between January 2022 and July 2023 under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act is telling – Shahdol has the highest number of such cases at 91, compared to Umaria at 29 and Anuppur at 28. Shahdol also has the maximum arrests at 104, followed by Anuppur at 36 and Umaria at 34. During this time period, police in Shahdol made their highest seizures ever of narcotic substances — 627 kg of Ganja, 4,719 bottles of cough syrups, 7,319 tablets and 438 injections.
Ahmed began his fight against drug abuse by bonding with his players over football. “If I straightaway tell them not to do drugs, why would they listen to me? So I built a relationship with the players and earned their trust, along with that of their parents, and explained to them why drugs are harmful,” he says.
Ahmed, with help from the local district officials, began targeting a new generation of players, and over the next decade, they finally got a batch of “clean” players.
CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan with the Bicharpur under-17 girls’ team that stood first in the state-level competition, winning the final match against Narmadapuram district 8-0. (Express Photo: Anand Mohan J)
“Our senior players and village elders helped beat this menace. Our current crop of players don’t use drugs and run anti-drug campaigns in the village. Now, if anyone doing drugs comes anywhere near the players, the children chase them away,” says Ahmed.
Anil Singh Gond, 31, is an imposing figure on the football field. A maintenance worker in Railways’ engineering department, he was once a striker. Part of Ahmed’s first batch, in the early 2000s, he played the National Games in Jammu and Kashmir.
“During my time, there were so many teammates who played under the influence. Many of them left the game forever. Ahmed sir was patient with them. We did not have shoes, jerseys or any kits and played barefooted. Sir used to buy us our kits with his own salary. That’s how he won us over, by trying hard and not judging us,” he says.
A PT Usha story to inspire girls
Ahmed, however, had a new challenge on his hands – how to get girls to play football. He noticed that while girls often hung around the football ground to watch the games, they were not allowed to play due to social taboos.
Laxmi Sahees, 28, is preparing for her role as the head coach at Bicharpur’s ‘Freedom Centre’ that is set to open soon. A centre that aims to groom the best players from Shahdol, the Freedom Centre will be equipped with modern facilities and coaches.
Part of Ahmed’s third batch, she has inherited much of Ahmed’s patience as she gently coaches Shivanya, 5, a barefooted player who is unable to collect her passes.
“Our parents used to say that if girls keep playing, then you won’t be able to do house work and homework. Setting up the women’s team was extremely difficult. We had to go door to door and convince the parents to allow their girls to play the game. The girls also don’t agree sometimes, as they were not ready to play in shorts. Plus, they have to go out of the state to play the matches, so there was the issue of safety too. We have to convince the parents about the pride involved in being part of the national level,” she says.
Ketram, the former defender, was among the senior players who worked to convince parents to allow their daughters to play. That’s when P T Usha came in handy.
“I was inspired by the story of PT Usha and her mother. I would tell the tribals how PT Usha’s mother was very strict and trained her to be an international athlete. It worked in some cases. The first batch of women players were mocked for wearing shorts. But once they began winning matches, the mentality changed. Ab line lag hai ladkiyo ki (Now girls queue up to play football),” he says.
On August 8, the Bicharpur under-17 girls’ team stood first in the state-level competition, winning the final match against Narmadapuram district 8-0. The Bicharpur girls’ team will represent the state in the Subroto Mukherjee Cup to be held in Delhi on September 14.
Earlier this month, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan met the Shahdol girls’ team as he wished them luck for the tournament.
“We expect our girls’ team to win the nationals. This is the best team we have,” Ahmed said.
Aspiring footballers of Bicharpur village in Madhya Pradesh put on their cleats. The children have come a long way from playing the sport barefoot just a few years ago. (Express Photo: Anand Mohan J)Warmups and clearing cow dung
While the coach and senior-level players had already honed the talent of the young footballers, it was Divisional Commissioner Sharma’s posting in Shahdol in 2021 that helped put the district’s football talent on the national map.
A novelist and poet, Sharma has been busy writing his book on the last Gond rulers, Shankar Shah and his son Raghunath Shah. But his passion remains football. “I think, live and sleep football. I have spent my entire energy on promoting this game,” he Sharma.
When he began his tenure in Shahdol in 2021, Sharma realised that “football was the game to invest in”.
“This is a beautiful place, but it has difficult terrain. The tribals here have strong thigh and calf muscles, which make them a natural at playing the game,” he says.
Sharma proceeded to rope in the departments of school, tribal affairs and rural development, besides the sarpanch and area MLA, and charted a plan to identify areas where football was played. Soon, 1,000 rural football clubs and 200 urban ones came up across the district.
Sharma also turned football into an effective “public grievance redressal system”. “Every time a football tournament is played, I visit the match along with the Superintendent of Police, District Magistrate and other officials, who listen to public grievances while enjoying the match.”
At Bicharpur village, where coach Ahmed and the villagers had spent years looking for a playground, Sharma helped procure a 6-acre land. Private companies have also been roped in to contribute for football kits and coaches.
However, Sharma concedes, Shahdol’s footballing journey has just begun, and there is a lot more ground that needs to be covered.
For one, the ground in Bicharpur is not level and doesn’t have a grass cover, which heightens the risk of players getting injured. With no boundary wall, animals often stray into the field and players spend a substantial part of their warm-up routine clearing the ground of cow dung. Recently, lights which were installed with funds from a local company were stolen and players can no longer train at night.
“Also, people here are poor and the lack of a high-protein diet hinders the fitness level of children playing the sport. How can you expect our players to perform on an empty stomach? They need a proper diet, medical checkups, and a physiotherapist. You need all of this to turn these children like Sanya into world-class footballers.”
