Why EPL needs India to improve in football rankings

EPL is arguably one of the best football leagues in the world currently. Founded in 1992 after the split of the football clubs in the First division, it almost has a combined club revenue of around £2 billion. The main attribute of Premier league is the way they have marketed it in Americas and Asia in the past decade.
One can find many supporters of clubs like Arsenal, United and Liverpool from India. On my recent visit to Bangalore, it was great to find a Manchester United Pub opposite to Forum.

But as per my understanding this is just the start. There are very few Indians who watch football. Mainly they are from North Eastern states, Bangalore, Mumbai, Goa and Kerala. There is a huge untapped market still to be conquered by the Premier league clubs.
The best way to do it is by having some Indian to play for these clubs. Unfortunately due to India's low FIFA ranking they cannot gain a UK work permit. That makes it more difficult to reach the grassroots of football in a huge country like India.
Hence this presents a great opportunity for PL clubs like Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City, Liverpool and the remaining to setup academies in India which would help to train world class players and also have a marketing strategy to tap the market.
Imagine a market of around 500 million young Indians and selling the merchandise to such a huge market. I cannot imagine it to be nothing but simply mouth-watering.
This would also provide support for Indian clubs to have affiliations with top class clubs which will also improve the I-League standard in Asia.

There are a couple of clubs setting up academies in India and it does look promising.
Like Cricket which was followed in India, but the 1983 world cup win was a major catalyst in transforming Cricket in India, football needs something of that sort to reinvigorate the lost passion among many young Indians.

India centric IT

After the economical and financial meltdown, most of the IT companies in India are now focussing on diversifying their market so that they do not have to completely rely on US and UK customers.
It is a great sea change when we have always been following US for most of the IT exports in the past 20 years. Dependability on US has been so huge that the ripples of Financial meltdown were felt in the Indian IT industry, but they just whitered it in a very good manner.
Is it not the right time for IT companies in India to also look at the local market? Each of the communities and states in US and UK have their own IT budget. There has been a huge investment by the Governments all around the world to move from conventional form of governance to more IT and Technologically enabled governance.

If each of the states and inturn districts in India start investing some part of their budget on IT then it would create more opportunities for Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and also have a more domestic driven economy.

One of the most urgent problems to be resolved is of the so many killings RTI activists in India. If we enable to process of acquiring Information through a case management methodology then, we may resolve this issue permanently and the identity of the activist cannot be used to such unhumane activities.

There are a lot of opportunities in India where enabling IT would resolve a lot of social issues and also create lot of jobs for the rural India.

Hope we can soon find the Indian Governament implementing significant IT projects, not only to become more technologically competant but also to enable fair and free regulations during governance.