india

Updated: Jun 23, 2020 21:09 IST

India could pick a page out of China’s playbook on fitness to popularise the “Fit India” movement launched by PM Narendra Modi on Thursday.

China’s national strategy on fitness has not only raised health awareness in the country but has also led to robust growth in the fitness industry.

In 2009, China designated August 8, the date on which the 2008 Beijing Olympics was inaugurated, as the “National Fitness Day” (NFD).

All public sports facilities are kept open for citizens for free that day and fitness campaigns are held across the country.

Designating a day as the NFD, however, was just the beginning.

In 2014, Beijing soon launched its first national fitness strategy which was streamlined to chalk out a four-year (2016-20) National Fitness Plan.

The plan led to popularising of football in China apart from promoting fitness and building large-scale infrastructure like public exercising facilities and gyms.

Also Read: India’s Fit India campaign to focus on bringing key behavioural changes in people

The free or inexpensive sports venues for the general public, funded by central finance, played a significant role in making exercise accessible, says a state media report.

“The plan also stresses the construction of public sports facilities. Great efforts are required to build small and medium-sized sports venues, county-level stadiums, national fitness centers, community-level multifunctional sports fields and other fitness facilities that are convenient for people to use. And the per capita area of sports fields will reach 1.8 square metres,” says the report.

“By the end of 2015, the government had built 573,580 exercise stations for free use, encompassing more than half of the country’s cities and villages and had trained nearly 2 million community sports instructors,” a state media report said.

“Over recent years, China has adopted integrated measures to provide more sports facilities. In urban areas, public gymnasiums, parks, and other sports venues are open to the public. In rural areas, the model of building one basketball playground and two table tennis tables has covered 570,000 administrative villages so far, and is set to reach another 50,000 shortly,” a report by the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) mouthpiece said on Thursday.

“As a result, Chinese people now do more exercise. The rising popularity of marathons in China is the epitome of such a trend. According to a report issued by the Chinese Athletics Association last year, the country held a total of 1,581 marathons in 2018, which meant that 4.3 races were held on average every day, up 43.5 percent from a year before,” the report added.

Another testimony is the rising number of active users on Keep, a mobile exercise app. It registered an average of 42 million monthly users between June and August.

A focus on fitness has also lead to big growth in the fitness industry in China.

“China’s fitness clubs generate $ 6.91 billion in 2018,” national broadcaster, CGTN quoted industry market research company IBISWorld as saying in a report in June. The number of fitness clubs stood at around 98000 in China the same year.