India, Aug. 20 -- Sports Authority of India (SAI) is "critically" under-funded and under-staffed, the parliamentary standing committee on sports has said, recommending a slew of measures to the union sports ministry. The panel, headed by Congress' Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh, presented a 40-page report to the upper house on Wednesday.

The report expresses concern over India's poor returns at the Olympics. "It is extremely painful that we being a country of approximately 1.4 billion population could not win even a single gold medal in the last Olympics in 2024 and most of the Olympics before that. The Committee feels that there is some gap or deficiency at the policy level in this regard," it said. It calls for broad-based talent spott...