KOLKATA: A pan-India study commissioned by German sportswear brand PUMA to understand the current state of physical activity and sports adoption in the country has revealed that one-third of the total population surveyed had not done any physical activity even once in the last one year.
The survey by market research agency Kantar IMRB covered 3,924 respondents in the age bracket of 18-40 years (both male and female). The respondents were spread across 18 cities, including main metros Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata, as well as Hyderabad and Pune.
By physical activity, the study looked at “any activity at home/outdoors/gyms/fitness centres such as running/walkingumba/yoga/swimming etc., as well as sports such as cricket, football, badminton, tennis, table tennis, basketball, volleyball, hockey, squash and local games such as kabaddi, kho-kho etc.”
The study also assessed the barriers to playing sport regularly.
Some of the other findings of the study are 57 per cent of the respondents have not played any sport for the last one year (three-fourth of this group last played a sport only in school or college), 58 per cent of those who don’t play any sport cited ‘lack of time’ as the main reason and 81 per cent of those who do play said they did so simply because they “enjoyed playing”.
However, according to the results of the study, those who don’t play spend close to 4-5 hours on social media, watching TV, personal phone conversations and usage of various messaging platforms on a typical working day (all put together).
The average frequency of uploading content on one’s social media handles was found to be nine times in a month.
