The National Doping Test Lab (NDTL) is on course for a total overhaul, says director P L Sahu as the only testing facility of the kind in the country works towards stepping out of the long shadows of a suspension.
On the anvil are awareness programmes, modernisation of equipment and scaling up of infrastructure to meet the challenges of doping among sportspersons, among the strongest taboos in the sporting world. “In the current scenario, inadvertent cases of doping due to lack of awareness around risks associated with the use of nutritional supplements, presence of contaminated products in the market and absence of relevant information about nutritional supplements lead to anti-doping rules violations and risk the career of athletes,” Sahu said in an interview. From about 6,000 samples per annum, the idea is to expand testing capacity manifold with the establishment of more dope testing laboratories outside Delhi and thereby a corresponding increase in revenue generation, Sahu said.
Set up first in 1990 as Dope Control Centre under Sports Authority of India, the lab was modernised in 2002 and got the WADA accreditation in 2008, becoming one of the 30 countries with such an accreditation in the world.