Golf in India Has a Lot of Room to Grow - NYTimes.com

Golf in India Has a Lot of Room to Grow - NYTimes.com

Golf was introduced to India by the British. They built the country’s first course, the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, in 1829. A number of other Raj-era courses followed. Unlike cricket, however, the sport never really caught on.

Today, there are about 100,000 golfers in India, according to Abhi Parmar, the retired Indian Army major general who heads the Indian Golf Union, the sport’s amateur governing body. Interest in golf, however, is clearly on the rise. Parmar estimates that 600 new players join the organization each year, a fourfold increase from a decade ago, and this is only a fraction of the few thousand who take up the game annually.

Sanjiv Talwar, the chairman of the Delhi Golf Club, which has one of best-known courses in the country, recalls a time, in the early 1960s, when the club struggled to recruit members. Now it has 4,800 members and a 20-year waiting list. It has also seen surging interest for its summer juniors program.

But this highlights what has been one of the major problems for Indian golfers: finding a place to play. There are fewer than 200 courses in the country, many of which do not conform to international standards and the vast majority of which are private. The number of public courses can be counted on a single hand.