NEW DELHI, Sept 3 (Reuters) - No fewer than 500 wrestlers were disqualified from India's under-17 championships for age fraud in June, highlighting a scourge experts believe is baked into the country's sporting culture and needs to be combated in the same way as doping.
The exclusions at the Gonda meet were the latest in a string of age-fraud cases and came less than a year after some 20 teams were expelled from India's top schools football tournament, the Subroto Cup, due to fielding overage players.
"It is endemic,"leading sports lawyer Aahna Mehrotra, who has authored a paper on the subject,told Reuters.
"Age fraud runs across most disciplines that have age-group competition, and it is at its worst at the sub-junior and junior levels, where the rewards are highest and the scrutiny is lowest."
India's chaotic system of birth registration and the absence of a single digital database for athletes have long left the door open for unscrupulous parents and coaches to exploit.
For those who have a couple of years shaved off their actual age, the potential rewards can be great. The unfair advantage of extra years of growth can lead to scholarships, sponsorships and fame.
In the case of the national sport, it could also give aspiring cricketers a head start in the pursuit of a life-changing Indian Premier League contract worth millions of rupees.
PSM Chandran, president of the Indian Federation of Sports Medicine, believes it should be punished in the same way as another modern scourge of sport.
"Age fraud is very much there, and the system is inadequate to stop it," he told Reuters.
"The federations have not done enough. The cricket board has taken a lead in recent times but we need more from other federations.
"We have such strict punishment for doping. Why can't we have something similar for the age frauds?"
Given that context, it is no surprise that when Vaibhav Sooryavanshi exploded onto the cricket scene in his early teens, doubts about his age immediately swirled around the internet.
If anything, though, the prodigiously talented Sooryavanshi could be considered something of a poster boy for attempts to rid Indian sport of age fraud.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India said Sooryavanshi, who made his international debut for India at the age of 15 earlier this year, had been subject to bone density tests since the age of 8.
The tests are mandatory for players in BCCI-approved tournaments.
NO SILVER BULLET
In 2012, the BCCI was the first sports body in India to adopt the TW3 method, which assesses skeletal maturity through an X-ray of the left hand and wrist. India's football and tennis federations have since adopted the method.
Chandran, a sports medicine expert with decades of experience, does not see it as a silver bullet, though.
"Certain bone tests are done in clinics which have no commitment to sports," he said. "I'm aware of incidents where an athlete submitted the bone test of someone else, and it has happened more than once."
Mehrotra, the founder of AM Sports Law & Management Co, said the TW3 method had "raised the floor", but was not without its limitations. The test is useful up to about the age of 16, she said, and can also unfairly flag a naturally early-maturing, big-boned teenager as overage.
India's Sports Ministry has drafted a code against age fraud in sports, which Mehrotra says is a step in the right direction.
"One cannot eliminate the menace 100% overnight, so the realistic goal is to make it far harder to commit and far more costly to attempt," she said.
"There has been a lot of conversation around criminalising doping in India. An evaluation of a similar consequence for people who aid minor athletes commit this fraud may be helpful."
CRIMINAL DETERRENT
The proposed Sports Ministry code shifts the emphasis from catching people out later in life to locking identity early in a central, digitally locked database.
It also recommends combining documentary checks with TW3, MRI, dental and physical examinations, and introduces criminal deterrence while offering an amnesty window for athletes to correct records without punishment.
Mehrotra said the legal deterrence in the code had to be routinely enforced "because a criminal consequence that is announced but never enforced is worth nothing".
At the same time, she argued, authorities needed to remember that young athletes are often victims, and not the architects, of age fraud.
"Protect the accused as seriously as you pursue the guilty, which means robust appeals and, because these are minors, strict data protection," she said.
(Reporting by Amlan Chakraborty in New Delhi; editing by Peter Rutherford)
