Reacting to the suspension of NDTL, Union Sports Secretary Radhey Shyam Julaniya denied the WADA charges on Friday.
“The decision is based on their inspection in September 2018 and comes at a time when all compliances have been done. They had pointed out 47 action points, of which on 43 they have accepted the NDTL’s compliance satisfactory.
“On the remaining four, work is near completion. The question is, have they taken into account the fresh developments during the last visit,” Julaniya told The Hindu.
Claiming that a lack of representation on the WADA Board was hurting India — something the government plans to rectify with Sports Minister Kiren Rijiju filing his nomination — Julaniya reiterated that the country was fully compliant to anti-doping rules.
“We were supposed to do 3000 tests (in a calendar year) and we have already done so. But now we will have to send samples out of India. The cost of testing here is less than 25 percent compared to other labs. The government would not want to incur irrational costs and so we will reduce the number of samples sent,” he explained.
Asked about the way forward, Julaniya said the government was keeping its options open. When we protested the decision, they started asking for voluminous paperwork of all things done in the past. It has to be prepared in a certain format which normally takes 3-4 months but we will try to do it all in two weeks.
“Then we can tell them to send their team for inspection. If we can do that and get the team to visit us early, we will follow that route. But if we feel that appealing would be the shorter route, we will try that. We will take a decision in two weeks,” Julaniya said.
IOA president Narinder Batra, however, put the blame on NADA. “Who will bear the extra cost?” he asked. But, Julaniya said NDTL was a separate entity and that NADA had no “shortcomings or lacuna, it is an effective body”.
NADA director-general Navin Aggarwal too distanced himself from the decision. He said NADA’s testing or sample collecting process would not be affected in any way.
