University Sports in India: The Two National Systems, and Three More You Haven't Heard Of

Chandigarh University won the MAKA Trophy, India’s oldest and most prestigious overall university sports championship, in 2023-24, the first private university to do so since the trophy was instituted in 1956-57. The same year, it also won the Khelo India University Games. These are two different national competitions, run by two different bodies, with two different histories, and most families researching sports-serious colleges have heard of neither by name, or assume they are the same thing. They are not, and knowing the difference changes how you evaluate a university’s real sports culture.

The older system: AIU and the MAKA Trophy

The Association of Indian Universities (AIU), through its Inter-University Sports Board, organises 206 sporting events annually across zonal and All India levels, for both men and women, largely funded by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. This is the traditional backbone of Indian university sport: the All India Inter-University Championships in individual sports, feeding into an overall points-based title, the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (MAKA) Trophy, awarded since 1956-57 to the university judged the year’s best overall performer in sport.

The MAKA Trophy’s recent winners tell their own story about which universities compete for it seriously: Panjab University, Chandigarh, in 2019-20 and 2020-21; Guru Nanak Dev University (GNDU), Amritsar, in 2021-22 and again in 2022-23, GNDU’s 25th MAKA win overall; and Chandigarh University in 2023-24, a historic result as the first private institution ever to lift it. Punjabi University, Patiala, holds one of the trophy’s great dynasties, winning it every year from 2005-06 through 2016-17 with only brief interruptions, a run that still defines the institution’s sporting identity.

Within the AIU structure, individual sports run their own long-standing championships. The Rohinton Baria Trophy, India’s premier inter-university cricket tournament, has been contested since the 1935-36 season, originally organised by the BCCI before the Inter-University Sports Board took it over in 1940-41. Mumbai University holds the record with 29 titles.

The newer system: Khelo India University Games

The Khelo India University Games (KIUG) is a separate, more recent structure, first held in Odisha in February 2020, and run directly under the Khelo India umbrella rather than through AIU. It scores universities on a team medal tally, not a points formula, and has grown fast: 222 universities competed in the 2025 edition across 23 medal sports. Its winners so far read differently from the MAKA Trophy’s list, though several names repeat: Panjab University (2020, 2023), Jain University, Karnataka (2022) and Chandigarh University, which won back-to-back in 2024 and 2025.

Panjab University and Chandigarh University appear on both lists. This series’ article on the institutions actually winning KIUG looks at what these institutions are doing, in current results, to show up on both.

Three more circuits, specific to technical institutes

Outside both AIU and KIUG, India’s premier technical institutes run their own parallel annual sports meets, entirely separate structures that a family researching an IIT, NIT or IISER needs to know about, since neither the AIU nor the KIUG story covers them:

• The Inter-IIT Sports Meet, running since 1961, is the oldest and largest of the three, covered in the next article in this series.
• The Inter-NIT Sports Meet and the Inter-IISER Sports Meet are smaller, more specialised parallels, covered together in the article after that.

Why this distinction matters practically

A university’s sports culture is not fully described by whether it offers a sports quota admission seat. The admission route gets an athlete in. Which of these competitive systems a university is active and successful in, AIU’s MAKA circuit, KIUG, or (for a technical institute) its own dedicated meet, tells you what competing there will look like for the next three to four years.