Off the charts: India’s high dope numbers points to a deeper rot

young new delhi: It’s firmly to seem past times cold numbers. India, for the third straight year, has topped the global list of dope offenders as per the statistics released by World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) in their Testing Figures Report for 2024. The embarrassing statistic puts India in a precarious position with the country primed to host a number of big-ticket multi-discipline events in near future.

A breakdown of the 260 Adverse Analytical Findings (AAFs) once again puts the spotlight on athletics (76 AAFs), weightlifting (43) and wrestling (29). A total of 148 AAFs from three disciplines alone means 57 percent of India’s dope offenders last year came from sports that have together contributed 11 Olympic medals. Boxing (17) and kabaddi (10) are the other sports that registered double-digit AAFs.

Athletics, with 1862 samples, was the most tested discipline while 664 weightlifting and 414 wrestling samples were tested by National Anti Doping Agency (NADA) in 2024. In percentage terms, wrestling was the worst with 7% of the samples returning positive results. For weightlifting, the positivity rate stood at 6.5% while athletics, at 3.7%, was lower. All three disciplines, however, were over India’s overall rate of 3.6%.

“India definitely has a doping problem and we are committed to address it,” Athletics Federation of India (AFI) spokesperson Adille Sumariwalla said. “However, it is unfair to pick on athletics. Our AAFs are high because we are testing more than any other NSF in the country. We ensure our athletes are tested right from the district-level meets.”

The doping menace in India goes much deeper than the elite or senior competitions. At the recent Khelo India University Games in Rajasthan, a number of events, primarily athletics, had an alarming number of Did Not Starts (DNSs) which was directly linked to the presence of NADA officials at the venue.

The Delhi State Athletics Championships in 2023 infamously had just one finalist — the others backed out after learning of NADA’s presence — and the only athlete who did run also flunked the dope test later.

“Let the numbers go as high as they can. I would say it is a great sign. It is an endorsement of our rigorous testing. NADA is doing a great job,” Sumariwalla added, referring to India’s testing numbers (7113). Only China (24,214), Germany (15,081), France (11,744), Russia (10,514), Italy (9,304) and UK (8,273) tested more although none logged a three-figure AAF.

A number of federation officials and coaches that HT spoke to cited job opportunities and cash rewards as primary reasons for athletes taking banned substances.

“A lot of our athletes know they don’t stand a chance to make the national team, let alone win an international medal. For them, getting the Khelo India scholarship is enough, and together with complying parents and coaches, they willingly go down that road,” Sumariwalla said.

The situation is the same across disciplines. With an enviable, and often life-altering, cash reward at stake, athletes coming from humble backgrounds are the easiest victims of the vast doping machinery.

“We need to up the testing numbers, plain and simple,” said a senior official at Wrestling Federation of India (WFI). “As of now, testing happens in senior and junior Nationals and U-23 Nationals along with other senior or junior level events conducted by the national federation. However, there’s no dope testing at district or state levels. Even if 2-3 samples are collected from such meets, it will prove to be a major deterrent,” the official explained.

The WFI, it is learned, had requested NADA to send a team to this year’s Haryana State Championships but nothing materialised.

National weightlifting coach Vijay Sharma, who has guided Mirabai Chanu to multiple World Championships medals as well as the Olympics silver in Tokyo, concurred.

“Just ramp up the testing and watch the magic unfold. Two years of intense testing will throw up far bigger AAF numbers but it will potentially eradicate the menace. There’s not enough testing happening at the moment. We need to catch the offenders at an early age,” Sharma said.

NADA, however, is busy defending this. A press note from the doping agency, circulated shortly after the WADA report came out, claimed it had tested 7068 samples as on December 16, 2025, with 110 AAFs (1.5% positivity rate). The drop of over 50% AAFs within a year is as much laudable as it is implausible.

“It is an incredible achievement. However, it may also mean there’s something off with our testing strategy,” a senior AFI official noted. NADA did not respond to HT’s query.

Testing apart, experts such as Sumariwalla believe the solution lies in criminalisation of doping. “The National Anti-Doping Bill 2025 is a step in the right direction but it stops short of criminalising doping. Unless we put the offenders — athletes, coaches, suppliers and drug traffickers — behind the bars, the situation will remain grim,” he said.

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