The Pursuit of Rugby In India

Sri City: The sport that was played among the Britishers in colonial India is suddenly gaining its popularity in recent times. On 26th October 2025, the Indian Men's Rugby Sevens Team secured their position as Runners-Up in the Asia Rugby Emirates Sevens Series which was held in Muscat, Oman. However, reaching this position at the continental stage also had a lot to do with its foundations in the past year when Indian actor Rahul Bose took charge of Rugby India as its President. Bose himself was a former rugby player who represented the country in 17 international rugby games. Over the past year, Rugby India has taken enough efforts to ensure enough financial backing for the sport and

its teams to thrive. In June this year, Capgemini, a French multinational information technology company, is on board with Rugby India as a transformation partner. What should be noticed is that Capgemini is headquartered in France, the same country that would be hosting the Rugby World Cup in 2026. 

Besides giving grants to regional and district players, universities, and spending on facilities, the federation has now birthed the idea of a Rugby Premier League. Rahul Bose believes that sports have thrived in India given that there has been a commercial sports league to represent that sport at a household level. What Bose is very keen on is the seven-a-side format of the game. In an interview with Forbes, Bose mentioned an anecdote where officials from the streaming platform ‘JioHotstar’ came to watch one of the rugby seven-a-side games. “After watching three games spanning an hour, they themselves said the sport is so easy to understand and that it’s perfect for today’s attention spans.”

Besides a series of obstacles Rugby India would have to surpass, among them is the challenge of popularity. Would rugby stand a chance in bagging its position in popularity as a number two position to India’s widely popular sport that is cricket? Rahul Bose himself said that out of 730 districts in India only 300-320 of them play rugby. However, Rugby India is doing its best to ensure that enough facilities are provided to cater to today’s requirements of the sport. In a podcast interview with Cyrus Broacha, Rahul Bose mentioned how Rugby India has adopted a similar model of the Indian Premier League where a common window is selected where no international games are played during that time, which allows all international players and coaches to come and participate in India’s Rugby Premier League. 

During an interaction with some of the top rugby players, Bose narrated his interaction with these elite players on Cyrus Broacha’s podcast “They asked me four questions: When is it? Oh we’re free. Where is it? Oh that looks good. How much are you paying us? Oh you’re paying us top dollar. And the last question, all elite sportspersons are and should be elite snobs and the question was: who are the coaches? What we did was we hadn’t waited for the franchises to hire coaches. We had hired six of the top coaches in the world.” 

Once the players were told of the top names of coaches like Ben Collings and Neil White, they readily agreed to participate in the RPL. 

To support rugby in India, the association must have managed their finances in a manner that includes all considerations and stakeholders involved, ranging from sponsors, coaches, facilities, other association members, players and whatnot. For a sport that is just gaining its momentum recently, getting 13 sponsorships on board with corporations like Hero Fincorp, JSW Cement, Amul, Bisleri, Capgemini and GMR is indeed some progress in getting some money flowing into the sport. Although the entire financial model of the Rugby Premier League has not been revealed yet, however what Bose told Forbes was that Rugby India will raise sponsorships which will give the six league franchises a healthy share to decide how do they plan on investing and utilizing their finances in a manner that caters to the standard of the sport. 

In a country obsessed with cricket, rugby making a mark in its own style with the Sevens format seems like quite the obsession a sport wants to chase. The Indian Super League tried its best, so did the Pro Kabaddi league. However Bose’s vision and leadership has paved the way for Rugby India, not just his name as an actor. The question is whether this newfound momentum can turn into a cultural sporting movement. Bose believes that there is no point in comparing rugby with cricket even though both sports were introduced to India during the colonial rule. However what he believes is that his vision down the line is that when a kid decides to take up a sport, rugby should be one of the top five choices is what he likes to believe. That is the kind of culture that the President of Rugby India wants to build. College rugby in commonwealth countries and other western countries is a major occasion. 

Hopefully, rugby becomes a sport that will also be played in Indian schools and colleges to have a happening junior level representation for the sport. Rugby India has certainly made a lot of progress with the new initiatives that they have taken, however it takes a very long time for a sport to become a cultural movement. Personally, I have never played rugby. But with the new format of the seven-a-side fourteen minute per session game time, I am sure I would personally give it a try. There have been examples in the past that have induced rugby’s popularity in a country and among its people and that is the example of post-apartheid South Africa. Nelson Mandela paved the way for the rise of rugby in South Africa by supporting the Springboks Team, a rugby club including mostly white South Africans. By supporting the Springboks, ‘Madiba’ as Mandela was fondly called, reduced racial tensions between the white and coloured South Africans by using rugby as an example. If our political leadership were to support this sport in some way, there could be a possible chance that allows rugby to rise to household fame.