There was a time when India's Commonwealth Games campaign was almost expected to end with a large medal haul. Glasgow offered a very different picture.
India finished fourth at the 2026 Commonwealth Games with 39 medals -13 gold, 17 silver and nine bronze. On paper, that is a sizeable drop from the 61 medals won at Birmingham in 2022. It is an even bigger contrast with Delhi 2010, when India won 101 medals and finished second in the table. But looking only at those numbers makes Glasgow look worse than it actually was.
The 2026 Games were much smaller than previous editions. Glasgow hosted just 10 sports, compared with 20 in Birmingham. Several sports in which India has traditionally collected medals were missing, including wrestling, badminton, hockey, table tennis and shooting. At Birmingham, the sports that were left out of Glasgow had produced 30 of India's 61 medals.
That changes the way India's 39 medals should be read. India was not competing in the same medal pool as it had four years earlier. The absence of wrestling, badminton and table tennis alone removed some of the country's most reliable routes to the podium. Hockey was missing too. Shooting, which has historically been one of India's biggest Commonwealth contributors, was also not part of the Glasgow programme. So the smaller tally was partly about what India did not have the opportunity to win.
What India did have produced some interesting results. Boxing became the biggest contributor to the Indian campaign. Ten Indian boxers won medals, including seven golds and three silvers. It was India's best-ever boxing performance at the Commonwealth Games. The result was particularly notable because several of the boxers were making their mark on a stage where India has usually depended on a different set of sports for its biggest hauls.
Athletics also gave the campaign some memorable moments. Gulveer Singh won silver in the 10,000 metres and bronze in the 5,000 metres, becoming the first Indian athlete to win two track medals at a single Commonwealth Games. Tejaswin Shankar added a bronze in the decathlon, another significant result for Indian athletics.
Then came the para events. India's para-athletes produced the country's best-ever performance at the Commonwealth Games. The seven medals included six in para-athletics, with athletes such as Sharmila Dhankar and Dilip Gavit winning historic gold medals. These results mattered for another reason: they showed that India's Commonwealth success was no longer being built only around the disciplines that have traditionally dominated the medal table.
There were other firsts as well.
Indian judo had its strongest campaign at the Games, while Mirabai Chanu won her third consecutive Commonwealth gold medal in weightlifting. These performances did not make the overall medal number look dramatically larger, but they added something more difficult to measure: new names and new sporting areas beginning to contribute.
This is where the comparison with 2010 becomes interesting.
Delhi remains India's most successful Commonwealth Games by medal count. The 101-medal haul was helped by a home Games and a much broader programme. Since then, India has remained one of the competition's strongest teams, regularly finishing among the leading nations. But the composition of that success has depended heavily on a handful of sports.
Glasgow disrupted that pattern. With several of those sports removed, India had to find medals elsewhere. It did not replace all of them, but it did find success in boxing, judo, athletics and para sports. That makes the 39-medal figure less useful as a simple measure of decline.
There is also a bigger reason to pay attention to what happened in Glasgow. India will host the Commonwealth Games in Ahmedabad in 2030. The handover took place during the Glasgow closing ceremony, officially passing hosting responsibilities to India.
By then, the question will not simply be whether India can return to a 60- or 100-medal haul. It will be whether the country can build enough depth across different sports that its Commonwealth performance does not depend on whether a particular discipline happens to be on the programme. Glasgow gave India 39 medals. More importantly, it showed where some of the next ones might come from.
References:
- Indian Express. (2026, August 3). String of firsts, new stars: Glasgow serves India hope, Asiad will give reality check.
- Indian Olympic Association. (2026). Glasgow 2026: India at the Commonwealth Games.
- NDTV Sports. (2026, August 3). India's Commonwealth Games 2026 medal tally lowest in 24 years, yet among the best.
- Press Information/News On AIR. (2026, August 3). India secures 39 medals at Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games.