Cricketers still dominate the Padma Awardees list but others catching up
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
February 12, 2020
Of all the Padma awards conferred on Sportspersons till date, 24% went to Cricketers. In the last 22 years, Cricketers accounted for 20% of the awardees. However, sportspersons from 29 different disciplines received an award during this period. Here is a detailed analysis.
One of the highest civilian
awards in the country, the Padma Awards, areawarded every year in three categories- Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan andPadma Shri, to recognise and honour the services rendered by Indians in variousdisciplines ranging from art, sports and literature, to medicine, science andengineering irrespective of gender, religion or race. This year, on the eve ofIndia’s 71  Republic Day,141 Padma Awards were announced including 7 Padma Vibhushan, 16 Padma Bhushanand 118 Padma Shri awards.
This year, 33 out of 141 Padma Awardees were Women
Factly
had earlier done an explainer on what the awards are, who they are given to and award trends so far. Thisyear, 33 awardees were women, 18 persons from NRI/POI/OCI/Foreigners category and 12 wereposthumously awarded. Women awardees include Olympic Medallists, M C Mary Komand P V Sindhu among many others. There were reports that the nine athletes nominated by the Sports Ministry for the 2020 PadmaAwards were all women. This story analyses the trend of Padma
awards to sportspersons.
242 Sportspersons have been recipients of the Padma
Awards since inception
Since theinception of the awards in 1954 till 2020, a total of 242 awardees were sportspersons.Of these, 241 were Padma Awards and one Bharat Ratna. Of the 241 Padma Awards,206 were Padma Shri, 31 were Padma Bhushan and 4 Padma Vibhushan. The onlyBharat Ratna in the field of sports was conferred to Sachin Tendulkar in 2014.The 4 Padma Vibhushan awardees are
Around 24% of the awards conferred to sportspersons
went to Cricketers.
Of the 242 awardsto sportspersons, 57 went to cricketers. Mountaineers were conferred 35 of themwhile Hockey players received 27 of them. Majority of the mountaineers werefrom the North East. The top ten sports in terms of awards received account for194 of the awards or 80% of the awards conferred to sportspersons till date.  In addition to those mentioned in the followingchart, six awards each have been conferred to Billiards players, Shooters andSwimmers. Four awards have been given to Archers and three to Weightlifters.
Cricket is the only sport with award recipients in all
four categories
Cricket not onlydominates in the total number of awards conferred to sportspersons, but also dominatesin each of the category of awards. More than 21% of the Padma Shri awards weregiven to cricketers. Further, 11 out of 31 (35.5%) Padma Bhushan awards wereconferred to cricketers. One of the four Padma Vibhushan awardees is acricketer. The only Bharat Ratna conferred to a sportsperson was also to acricketer.
Mountaineeringaccounted for the second highest number of awards with more than 5% of PadmaShri awards, five Padma Bhushan awards and a Padma Vibhushan.
27 awards receivedby Hockey players constituted of 26 Padma Shri and one Padma Vibhushan award.  Dhyan Chand was one of the firstsportspersons to receive a Padma Award. He received Padma Bhushan for Hockey in1956.
All the 23 awardsgiven to athletes were  Padma Shri.
20 sportspersons received Padma Awards at least two
times
While a total of242 awards were conferred to sportspersons, it is observed that 43 of these awardswent to 20 persons or in other words, 20 persons were the recipients of theawards at least twice. Sachin Tendulkar, Vishwanathan Anand and Mary Kom wererecipients of these awards thrice. In the following table, Bharat Ratna, PadmaVibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri have been abbreviated as BR, PV, PB andPS respectively.
Six cricketershave received Padma Awards multiple times. Three persons each from Badminton,Mountaineering and Tennis received the award at least twice. Pullela Gopichand,Saina Nehwal and P V Sindhu, the three recipients of multiple awards inBadminton are from Telangana.
Nine states account for almost 75% of the awards
conferred to sportspersons
Three states have more than 20 awardees each while nine states have more than ten awardees each. Maharashtra tops the list with 35 awardees followed by Delhi with 28 and West Bengal with 20 awardees. Haryana and Karnataka have 17 awardees each followed by Punjab and Tamil Nadu with 16 each. Telangana has 15 awardees and Uttar Pradesh has 14. These nine states alone account for almost three-quarters of the awardees in sports. Of the 35 awardees in Maharashtra, 16 were cricketers.
Cricketers still dominate the Padma Awardees list but
others catching up
In the 66 odd years, from when Padma Awards were introduced in the country, the trend of padma awardees from various sports has fluctuated. Between 1954 and 1976, a total of 60 awards were given to sportspersons. In the subsequent period, 1977 to 1998, only 54 awards were given in total to sportspersons. However, in  the 1999-2020 period, sportspersons received a total of 128 awards, a lot more than the total number of awards in the previous years- 52% of the awards in sports were given out in this period. This increase is also to do with the general increase in the number of padma awards given during this period.
It is evident fromthe data that cricket dominated in each of these periods with the maximumnumber of awards conferred. In the 1954-1976 period, one out three sportspersonswho received the award was a cricketer. However, in 1977-1998 and 1999-2020,cricketers accounted for one-fifth of the awardees in sports.
Similarly, thepercentage of awardees in Mountaineering has dropped from 30% up to 1976 to 11%in 1977-98 and further down to 8.6% in 1999-2020. Same is the case with Hockey,from 15% in 1954-76 to 8.6% in 1999-2020. However, the percentage of awardeesin other sports such as Badminton, Tennis, Athletics and Shooting haveincreased recently.
Between 1954 &1976, sportspersons belonging to 10 different sports disciplines wererecipients of padma awards compared to 13 between 1977 & 1998. This numberhas more than doubled to 29 in the 1999-2020 period which is an encouragingsign.