In August 2016, I travelled to Gurdaspur in northern Punjab, close to the border with Pakistan, to photograph a judo training centre for The Wall Street Journal. It was my first trip to the state. The coach, Amarjit Shastri, a former Sanskrit teacher and trade union leader, had been training kids, mostly from impoverished Dalit families, in a barebones facility behind the local government school. For many families, the centre’s training regimen was a ploy to keep their kids away from drugs, and for a few, it was the prospect of a government job under a sports quota.

This year, something unexpected happened. One of Shastri’s students, 24-year-old Avtar Singh, became the first Indian judoka to qualify for the Olympics in over a decade. Singh was on his way to Rio, so we followed two brothers, Rohit, 15, and Sajan, 14, who showed promise in the sport.

Indian Olympic athlete Avtar Singh has blazed a trail that 15-year-old Rohit hopes to follow—to sporting glory and, perhaps more important, to a secure government job.

The first Indian man to qualify for the Olympics in judo in more than a decade, Singh, 24 years old, grew up here, in the same small town where Rohit lives, and trained for more than seven years in the same high-school gym.

Postscript:  At some point during the two days we spent working on the story, Shastri and I started chatting about Punjab and the drug menace. He told me about Punjab’s agrarian crisis and how it was partly responsible for young men from the state falling prey to drugs. I was intrigued and wanted to know more. I returned to Punjab two months later to better understand the origins of the crisis in Punjab’s farmlands and kept going for the next eight years, resulting in Heavy Lies the Grain.

Having signed a string of multibillion-dollar orders from foreign firms to make parts for helicopters, jet fighters and trains, India is struggling to find people with the skills to build them.