A NITI Aayog task force wants Formula One back in India by 2028
On 15 September 2026, Union Sports Minister of India, Mansukh Mandaviya, announced a ten-member task force to assess the feasibility of reviving Formula One in India.
NITI Aayog, or the National Institution for Transforming India, is the apex public policy think tank of the Government of India. It essentially acts as an advisory body providing strategic, directional and technical input for national development.
This will be chaired by NITI Aayog programme director and adviser Yugal Kishore Joshi. Its mandate, according to Mandaviya, is to draft a coordinated roadmap for the sport’s return “so that we can host a race in 2028.”
This committee includes the Joint Secretary of the Department of Sports, Kunal, the president of the Federation of Motor Sports Clubs of India and representatives from the Department of Tourism, the Department of Commerce and the Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra state governments.
Notably, it also includes officials from the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs and the Central Board of Direct Taxes – the two bodies whose predecessors’ decisions ended the sport’s last stint in the country.
India has said it wants F1 back before. What is different this time is who has been put in the room to stop the same mistake from happening twice.
What actually ended the last Indian Grand Prix
The Indian Grand Prix ran for three editions at the Buddh International Circuit in Greater Noida, from 2011 to 2013. Sebastian Vettel won all three for Red Bull.
The circuit itself was never the problem: built by Jaypee Sports International at a reported cost of ₹2,000 crore (roughly $210 million), designed by Hermann Tilke, and rated FIA Grade 1, it drew praise from drivers and teams throughout its run.
The commercial structure around it was the problem. Jaypee had signed a $40 million Race Promotion Contract with Formula One World Championship Ltd, plus a separate licensing agreement to use F1’s branding.
Under Indian tax law, this arrangement created a “permanent establishment” for FOWC. This triggered a 40% withholding tax on the UK-based company’s race income.
Separately, the Sports Ministry declined Jaypee’s request for customs duty waiver on imported race equipment – engines, tyres, disassembled car components – a waiver that had been extended to the Commonwealth Games and the Cricket World Cup.
The stated reasoning was that F1 did not qualify as “purely a sport”; it was treated as entertainment and commercial activity instead.
One structural fact, independent of anything the new task force does, is that the entertainment tax that applied to the 2013 race no longer exists in the form that broke it.
Entertainment tax was a state-level levy, set unilaterally and varying widely by state; it was subsumed into the Goods and Services Tax from 1 July 2017. States can no longer classify an event as “entertainment” to apply a standalone levy outside that unified structure.
Sporting events today fall under GST slabs instead, generally in the 18-28% range depending on classification. That closes off the specific mechanism Uttar Pradesh used against Jaypee in 2013.
However, it does not, on its own, resolve how F1’s UK-sourced hosting income would be taxed, or how customs duties on imported race equipment would be treated. Both of which remain live questions for the CBIC and CBDT representatives on the task force.
The Uttar Pradesh government then moved to revoke a 2011 entertainment-tax exemption. In 2013, a Supreme Court petition sought to freeze a quarter of ticket revenue pending settlement of roughly $4 million in disputed dues.
The race went ahead only after payment assurances were given. By then, attendance had already fallen from the 2011 debut to around 65,000 tickets sold in 2013 – a drop of about 60%. The event was cancelled for 2014, and proposed comebacks in both 2015 and 2016 failed to get off the ground.
Every one of those flashpoints was a taxation or classification dispute. That the current task force has CBIC and CBDT representation built in from the start – rather than a promoter negotiating alone against the state after the fact – is the clearest structural change from 2013.
The circuit has a new, and different, owner
BIC’s ownership has changed since 2013. Jaypee Group’s parent company, Jaiprakash Associates Ltd, fell into financial distress.
The Adani Group emerged as the winning bidder for its assets in a deal reported at approximately ₹14,535 crore, bringing BIC under Adani ownership.
Karan Adani, managing director of Adani Ports and SEZ, has spoken about the circuit in personal terms, describing his own interest in the sport dating back to the Michael Schumacher era and saying he is “personally engaged in terms of bringing Formula 1 back into India.”
The practical significance is financial rather than sentimental. Current F1 hosting fees are estimated to run in the region of $50 million a season – a figure Jaypee, midway through a broader corporate crisis, struggled to sustain by 2013.
Adani’s balance sheet is viewed as materially better placed to absorb that cost. This changes the promoter-side risk calculation considerably.
BIC has not been dormant in the interim. It hosted MotoGP Bharat in 2023, the first MotoGP round held in India, which served as a proof of concept that the circuit could still stage a world-championship event at FIA/FIM standard.
That momentum has been uneven since: the 2024 MotoGP round was cancelled over operational and weather concerns, and the 2025 edition was pushed back to 2026. Mandaviya visited BIC earlier in 2026, a visit widely read as a precursor to the task force announcement.
The case built on fan numbers
The government’s underlying argument is that the Indian market has outgrown the one F1 walked away from in 2013. A 2025 survey by F1 and the Motorsport Network, covering more than 100,000 fans across 186 countries, put India’s fan base at 78.8 million. This number is up from roughly 60 million in 2024.
More recent industry figures put the number closer to 98 million by mid-2026, though that specific figure originates from the social-media post citing internal data rather than a published F1 or Nielsen release, and is best treated as indicative rather than confirmed.
Even the more conservative, sourced figure is significant. If accurate, it places India’s fan base within range of Europe’s and roughly double the United States’, though comparable mid-2026 figures for those markets are not yet public.
FanCode, F1’s exclusive Indian broadcast partner, has extended its rights through 2028 and doubled its platform-wide user base from 100 million in 2024 to more than 200 million in 2026. F1: The Movie, the 2025 Brad Pitt film, grossed over ₹125 crore in India – its largest non-US market.
F1’s own leadership has responded to this with more caution than the Indian government. Chief executive Stefano Domenicali, in an interview with FanCode in Barcelona, said the sport’s ambition was that “we’re going to be there for sure one day and in the right condition,” while stopping short of naming a date.
F1’s chief communications and corporate relations officer, Liam Parker, was more explicit in July 2026, telling BlackBook Motorsport that the sport “could be doing more” to engage its Indian audience while also describing a calendar return as unlikely in the medium term.
Momentum, and the timeline problem
The gap between those two statements – Dominicali’s open-ended optimism and Parker’s “unlikely in the medium term” – sits quite awkwardly against the government’s own stated target. Mandaviya told reporters during an April 2-26 visit to BIC that India would “surely” host F1 by 2027. However, by September, that target had already shifted to 2028.
Against a backdrop of two failed revival attempts in 2015 and 2016, a second timeline shift within the same calendar year is a pattern that needs to be tracked instead of dismissed.
There is also a calendar-slot problem that sits outside India’s control entirely. F1 currently runs a 24-race season, widely regarded within the sport as close to its practical ceiling given driver, team and logistics workload.
Adding an Indian round would most likely require either a further calendar expansion or another circuit losing its slot.
That is a commercial negotiation between Liberty Media, the promoter and existing host venues that has nothing to do with India’s own tax or infrastructure readiness. Domenicali’s and Parker’s more guarded public language may reflect that constraint as much as any doubt about India’s market potential.
What is actually new is the institutional weight behind this attempt. Previous revival efforts were driven largely by promoter interest and sports-ministry statements of intent.
This task force sits under NITI Aayog, India’s central policy think tank. Its terms of reference explicitly cover a national policy framework, infrastructure development and a public-private partnership model – alongside direct tax-authority representation.
The initiative has also been folded into the government’s broader “Play in India” push, which frames motorsport development as extending to grassroots and regional circuits, not just a single marquee event.
The FMSCI’s own leadership is in flux at the same time: its presidency, currently held by Arindam Ghosh, is due for election at the federation’s AGM later this month, meaning the body’s representative on the task force could change within weeks of the committee’s formation.
None of that guarantees a 2028 Grand Prix. It does mean that, for the first time since 2013, the specific mechanism that killed the Indian Grand Prix is being addressed directly rather than assumed away.
Whether that translates into a race on the calendar will depend less on fan-base charts than on whether the CBIC and CBDT representatives in that room reach a different conclusion than their predecessors did.
Comments