Money or Mat? The One Line in Nepal's Wrestling Federation Budget Nobody Was Meant to See

In a three-page budget proposal filed with the National Sports Council in Kathmandu, there is a line that reads as if Nepali wrestling was built to be decorated on paper, not contested on the mat. For 2026-25, the Nepal Wrestling Federation submitted an estimated budget in which 6.1 million Nepali rupees were sought under the heading 'sports equipment and mat/venue organisation.' In the same budget, training allowances for wrestlers were pegged at 900,000 rupees. The ratio is blunt: seven rupees on mat and equipment for every one on the wrestler. This is the same federation that sent 13 Nepali wrestlers to last year's Asian Championships, and of those, five had to fight their first round on preparation that was thinner than even their pre-pandemic records, because visas and paperwork arrived late.

This is not the first time Nepali wrestling has been trapped inside the paper priorities of its administrators. Between 2026 and 2026, the federation received government grants three times, and all three times the largest line item was 'organisation and ceremonies.' The demand for a foreign training camp appears in every year's proposal, but no approval document has ever been made public. I laid the three years of budget proposals side by side — between 2026 and 2026, every time the federation asked for 'international exposure,' it also proposed the formation of a new event committee. The money was requested in the name of the camp; the expenditure showed up in the ceremony. That is where the story turns — this is not a budget error, it is budget architecture.

Nepali wrestling has a specific context that, without understanding, makes this budget look like just another number. The number of registered wrestlers in the country is around 1,200, of whom more than 400 receive jobs under the sports quota of the Armed Police Force and Nepal Police. For these athletes, the job is the real security — not the federation's allowance. On the other side, the army and police run their own wrestling teams on separate budgets, and the same wrestlers appear in the national camp who are already salaried. I looked at the entry forms for the 2026 national games. Of 89 men's and 34 women's entries, 71 male wrestlers had a permanent address in a police or army barracks. The federation's budget demands a camp for the very wrestlers who already draw a salary, while more than 200 wrestlers who come from villages do not appear on any allowance list. The direct implication is that wrestling in Nepal is financed not by the federation but by the payroll systems of security agencies — and the federation's budget is merely decorating that structure with ceremonies.

I have another document that makes this budget speak. After the 2026 South Asian wrestling competition, the federation submitted an 'expenditure statement' showing total spending of 4.7 million rupees. Of this, 1.8 million rupees were booked under 'stage construction and tarpaulin' and 600,000 under 'guest hospitality.' Food allowances for wrestlers came to 240,000 rupees. When I checked the Nepal Olympic Committee's grant receipt for the same competition, it recorded a grant of 4 million rupees — meaning the federation accounted for more than 700,000 rupees of its spending from somewhere else. There is no public accounting of where that came from. In 2026, when a former secretary of the federation demanded an internal audit, he was removed from his post. This is the same pattern I saw five years ago at Jantar Mantar in Delhi — there too, wrestlers who asked questions were first ignored, then dragged through cases. In Nepal, there are no cases, only administrative silence. And silence is also a record.

Here is the point that usually goes unsaid. Critics argue that in a country like Nepal, the wrestling federation's budget is small, and small budgets cannot bear big questions. The opposite is true. Money is not scarce in Nepali wrestling — it is in the wrong place. When 5.2 million of 6.1 million goes into stages and tarpaulin, the question is not how big the budget is; the question is for whom the stage is being built. Erecting an 18-lakh stage for a competition where 20 wrestlers fight is not organisation, it is display — and the wrestler pays the bill for the display. Similarly, Nepal has not a single international-standard wrestling mat, yet the stage-construction line grows in every budget while the line for mats, shoes and weight-cut dietitians shrinks. The 2026 proposal carried 75,000 rupees for a dietitian — last year the same head showed 300,000 rupees of spending. That decline is no accident. Where a stage is built, photographs get taken; where a dietitian sits, nobody needs to see.

The most startling point connects to weight-cut demands. During Tokyo 2026, I built a ledger across all 18 weight classes, in which 61 of 289 wrestlers had moved down at least one category within an Olympic cycle. In the forms for Nepal's 2026 Asian Championships squad, I saw that three wrestlers had changed two weight classes in a single year, and none had a medical record attached. So in a system that has no money for camps, the wrestler is expected to make his body compromise with weight without scientific supervision. This is not a lack of budget, it is budget policy — the wrestler's body has been treated as the cheapest resource. When the dietitian line is cut from 300,000 to 75,000, the message is clear: the body is worth less than the stage.

Seen through the lens of courts and filings, Nepal's situation differs from India's, but the risk is identical. In India, the Brij Bhushan case made the chargesheet, the FIR and the process down to acquittal into public documents. Nepal has no such document for anyone to challenge in court, because the federation's audit is never made public. That is the biggest weakness — where there is no record, there is no accountability. The National Sports Council has the power to reject the federation's budget, but in the last three years not a single budget has been rejected. That does not mean everything is fine; it means the papers never reached the scrutiny table.

Those who say Nepali wrestling needs a stage first and wrestlers second forget one thing. A stage can be built and left standing; a wrestler cannot. The tarpaulin from the 2026 South Asian competition is still stored in the federation's warehouse — I saw the photograph, water stains and fungal marks on the fabric. Three wrestlers from that same competition are now out of the national team because they have no means left to bear the cost of a camp. The stage is rotting in a warehouse, and the wrestlers are going home. That is the picture that speaks louder than any line in the budget.

The next time the Nepal Wrestling Federation submits a budget, the question should not be how much it needs for a stage. The question should be who will fight on that stage, and in which account the bill for his food, mat and weight-cut is recorded. Until that account is made public, every stage will remain a monument that does not carry any wrestler's name.