The Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), which oversees the management of integrity programmes for World Athletics, has flayed the quality of India’s anti-doping programme as being not proportionate to the doping risk and has recategorised the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) to the extremely high risk Category A under Rule 15 of World Athletics’ Anti-Doping Rules.
AIU Chairperson David Howman cited 212 Anti-Doping Rule Violations by Indians from 2022 to 2025 and said while AFI had advocated anti-doping reforms within India, not enough had changed. “AIU will now work with AFI to achieve reforms to safeguard the integrity of Atheltics as it has done with other Category A national federations.
AIU considers and balances two factors – the absolute doping risk posed by athletes and support personnel and current and potential success of a Federation’s athletes. As far as absolute doping risk goes, AIU looks at the doping history of athletes and athlete support personnel under the jurisdiction of a National Federation, confidential intelligence and compliance by the Federation.
As for assessing confirmed or potential success in sport, AIU looks at the success of a National Federation (including in continental championships and continental games), any significant improvement in the performances of athletes from a National Federation at any level of competition and the number of athletes representing the Federation in international competitions.
In 2025, AFI was among 57 National Federations in Category B while seven National Federations – Belarus, Bahrain, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Russia and Ukraine – were in Category A. AFI, which has been added to this extremely high risk Category A list for 2026, will now have to establish an Anti-Doping Monitoring Committee to oversee and ensure compliance with Rule 15.
If AIU’s 2025 Summary of Obligations for Category A National Federations is any indication, the testing protocols for India’s international athletes will see some significant changes, with at least three out of competition tests before a major competition (last year, it was the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo).
Be that as it may, AIU’s decision to recategorise AFI to Category A must be viewed as a commentary of the anti-doping programme in India being administered by the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA). However, the AIU release does not specify the exact areas of concern. Nor is it apparent if AIU had earlier sough to flag any issues for NADA to rectify.
From the periphery, it would appear that NADA had done well to collect more than 5700 samples from 2022 to 2025. Of these, 48 resulted in Anti-Doping Rule Violations (ADRV) in 2022, 63 in 2023, 71 in 2024 and 30 in 2025. As per the World Anti-Doping Agency 2024 Testing Figures Report, NADA collected 1068 samples in competition and 794 out of competition.
We may never get to know the specific areas that AIU would like NADA to alter, but its decision to recategorise AFI to the extremely high risk Category A can have a wide ranging impact on the sport at all levels. And this may be the catalyst that nudges the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports to finally criminalise the trafficking of banned substances.
Image: Created with Google Gemini for illustration purposes only
