Balbir Singh Sr. to Khalsa College, Amritsar. Finally, Balbir got the permission from his family to take the transfer to Khalsa College in 1942 and began intensive training and practice sessions under Harbail's guidance. Later, Harbail coached the successful Indian national hockey team at the Helsinki and Melbourne Olympics. Khalsa College had four hockey pitches. In 1942–43 Singh was selected to represent Punjab University, which, at that time, covered colleges from a large region consisting of undivided Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Sindh and Rajasthan. The Punjab University team won All India Inter-University titles with Singh as Captain three years in a row: 1943,
India national cricket team sixth team to be granted Test cricket status. In its first fifty years of international cricket, India was one of the weaker teams, winning only 35 of the first 196 Test matches it played. From 1932 India had to wait until 1952, almost 20 years for its first Test victory. The team, however, gained strength in the 1970s with the emergence of players such as batsmen Sunil Gavaskar and Gundappa Viswanath, all-rounder Kapil Dev and the Indian spin quartet of Erapalli Prasanna, Srinivas Venkataraghavan, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar and Bishen Singh Bedi. Traditionally much stronger at home than abroad, the Indian team