Effectively Participating Population

India's lack of success in Olympics is discussed in various places: Rediff, Chrumuri and Marginal revolution. Marginal Revolution links to an interesting article by Anirudh Krishna and Eric Haglund which is discussed in An Academic View of India. For me, this article is more interesting than olympics and it may form a basis for further study in different areas of development. Excerpts from the article:
"Not only for Olympics, but also in regard to Nobel Prizes, mathematical and scientific excellence, winning patents, etc, enlarging the pool of effective participants can be importantly applied. In this analysis, we consider two separate arenas, one related to sports and the other to social mobility. In both cases, we examine the plausibility of an explanation based on effective participation rates. Since the numbers of effective participants are not readily available – this concept, like some other valuable ones, such as democracy, social capital and human well-being is not easy to pin down in terms of a precise metric – we rely in our analysis on two sets of surrogate evidence.
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The macro as well as the micro part of the analysis show that public information matters a great deal....But we find that public information still has an important effect. Enhancing public information will deepen and widen the pool of effective participants, enabling individuals to find positions more commensurate with their abilities, and simultaneously enabling countries to ratchet up their performance in
diverse arenas.
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The Olympic Games, while important enough in and of themselves, also served here as a useful metaphor, a starting point for an analysis concerning other and more pressing livelihood concerns. Thus, we view success in the Olympics as an indicator more broadly of the provision of opportunity to a country’s populations. Countries which enable a higher fraction of potential athletes to achieve the ultimate success of winning an Olympic medal are likely to be similarly successful in developing and fostering talent in other areas. Where the fraction of effective contestants for positions in national sports teams is very low, the prospects of social mobility generally are also likely to be disappointing.
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Advancing information and enabling access are as much a critical part of raising Olympic achievement as they are of enhancing development success and other achievements. In general, information and access are crucial for effective participation. Where more people are able to participate more effectively – in the economy, in competitive sports, in public decision-making, and in other walks of life – the country will grow faster and more citizens will benefit."
P.S. There is a lot of emphasis on access to information in the article. Access to information may not mean access to opportunities. My son-in-law is an Anglo-Indian who lived in several places in India until the age of 16-17. He was a keen swimmer those days and was never selected even to represent a club after winning the local events. In the very first year of his arrival in Australia he was selected for olympic trials but his swimming career was unfortunately cut short due to an accident.