India's high dope numbers point to a deeper rot

It’s hard to look past cold numbers.

- Shantanu Srivastava

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%.