Ask anyone about the teacher who changed things for them and you will hear about a maths teacher, or an English teacher, or the one who stayed back after school. Almost nobody names the person who took the games period.
The coaches now working with FanToPark Play across Delhi-NCR came out of that job. They trained at physical education institutions, took school posts, and spent years running the one period in the timetable that no child is graded on.
"Some months the games period just stopped appearing on the timetable. Nobody told me it was cancelled, it simply wasn't there. Those weeks I was given invigilation duty or office work instead," said Ajay Sharma, who taught physical education at a school before joining FanToPark Play.
The structure of the job explains a lot of it. CBSE requires one Health and Physical Education period every day for classes 1 to 12, and taking part in it is a condition of sitting the Class 10 and 12 boards. The same policy says the marks do not count towards a student's final result, and that schools are not required to have a physical education teacher to run the period. Any teacher can conduct it.
None of that was written to diminish anybody. It was written so that timetables would not have to change. But it means the one qualified sports professional in a school is running a subject the system has already told everyone is optional.
{{/usCountry}}None of that was written to diminish anybody. It was written so that timetables would not have to change. But it means the one qualified sports professional in a school is running a subject the system has already told everyone is optional.
{{/usCountry}}The pay reflects it. The average physical education teacher in India earns around ₹21,400 a month, based on 154 reported salaries. Government posts pay roughly double, with entry-level TGT physical education roles at Pay Level 7 on the 7th Pay Commission scale, but there are far too few of those to absorb the graduates coming out every year.
"The pay was never enough to plan a life around. My wife's cousin asked me once when I was going to get a proper job, and he meant it kindly. I left and spent a year doing work that had nothing to do with sport," said Gaurav Gupta, who now coaches with FanToPark Play.
Most physical education graduates in India do not stay in coaching. That is not a comment on how much they wanted to.
"I take eleven sessions a week now, across four societies. Taekwondo mostly, some general fitness for the younger ones. It is the same coaching I was doing in school, except I am doing it six days a week instead of one period a day, and I know what I will earn at the end of the month," said Shivani Savita, who coaches with FanToPark Play.
"The qualification was never the problem. These are people who spent three or four years training in physical education and then found there was no employer who could give them a full week of work. That is not a failure of the schools, they are working with the timetable and the budget they have. Somebody had to build the demand side, and that is the business we are in," said Amit Purohit, Founder, FanToPark.
FanToPark Play hires coaches from physical education institutions and places them into residential societies across Gurugram, Noida, Dwarka and the wider NCR. A coach who once had a single school's games period now works across several buildings in a week.
FanToPark Play now has more than 100 coaches in its network across Delhi-NCR. Every one of them is a certified coach with formal training in physical education.
In most schools, the games period will still be on the timetable, somebody will take it, and the sports teacher will still be the one nobody names.
The coaches here are still teaching the same sports to the same age group, a few kilometres from the schools they left. The difference is how many days a week the work exists.
About FanToPark
FanToPark builds sports travel, fan experiences and grassroots coaching in India. Its coaching vertical, FanToPark Play, runs certified sports coaching for children inside residential societies across Delhi-NCR.
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