NEW DELHI, April 20 (Reuters) - Indian athletes must now meet tougher anti-doping requirements after their federation was placed in World Athletics' highest-risk category, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) said on Monday.
India ranked among the top two in athletics'most anti-doping rule violations between 2022 and 2025, prompting the AIU board to move the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) from Category B to Category A.
Category A federations, deemed the highest risk, face stricter obligations under the rules, including minimum testing thresholds for national-team athletes, the AIU said.
"The doping situation in India has been high-risk for a long time and, unfortunately, the quality of the domestic anti-doping programme is simply not proportionate to the doping risk,” AIU Chairman David Howman said in a statement.
“While the AFI has advocated for anti-doping reforms within India, not enough has changed. The AIU will now work with the AFI to achieve reforms to safeguard the integrity of the sport of athletics, as we have done with other ‘Category A’ member federations."
India, which will host the 2030 Commonwealth Games and is bidding for the 2036 Olympics, has also topped the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) list of doping offenders for three straight years.
WADA president Witold Banka, who was in India last week, called the easy availability ofperformance-enhancing drugs in the country a "serious problem", and met senior officials of India's federal police seeking help to disrupt supply chains.
AFI spokesperson Adille Sumariwalla said the federation was working with the AIU, the sports ministry and India's National Anti-Doping Agency to address the issue.
"AFI has got a strong plan and we are all for criminalising doping in this country," Sumariwalla, also a World Athletics vice president, told Reuters by telephone.
"There's nothing wrong in more scrutiny. More athletes are getting caught in India because more tests are being conducted.
"We are fighting it tooth and nail. The crooks and criminals doing it should be stopped by police. We are not police, our job is to create a policy and the government is helping."
When an Indian delegation visited the International Olympic Committee (IOC) headquarters in Lausanne last year, they were told to curb the doping menace to boost their Olympic bid.
(Reporting by Amlan Chakraborty in New Delhi; editing by Pritha Sarkar)
