The Indian contingent to Rio Olympics 2016 was made up of 118 players competing for 15 disciplines. At the last tally, we returned home with two medals, one silver, and one bronze.

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Why does India, a country of 1.2 billion people, struggle to win medals in Olympic games? Now that I've baited you, here are a couple of charts.

In the first chart, I took the top - 25 countries by count of weighted medals (gold = 4, silver = 2 and bronze = 1) in 2012, and plotted them by their GDP. Surprisingly linear fit. China, Russia, and Great Britain do better than the others. Japan, Canada, Brazil do worse than the others. But more or less, the number of medals you win is proportional to your country's GDP.

this New York Times article on how Jamaica does it.

Learning #4: Singular focus and institution building around one sport.

So what can India do to win medals?

1. Become a large GDP country (we are already there)
2. Increase per capita GDP (another 20 years)
3. Become an authoritarian country (er, sorry, no!)
4. Singular focus on one sport (er, maybe not)

So our only option is #2. If you are doing anything that helps us increase our per capita, then you are helping India win Olympic medals (in the future). Think about it -- Olympics is more a proxy for Human Development Index (HDI) of a country than it is for raw talent in that country. By 2050, we will be a high per capita GDP country and we will be in top-10 in the medals tally. Till that happens, we need to Keep Calm and Carry On.

Zishaan Hayath, the author of this post, is the co-founder of Toppr.com. You can read the original post here.