At least 500 wrestlers were disqualified from India’s under-17 championships in June for age fraud, underscoring a problem experts say is deeply entrenched in the country’s sporting culture and should be tackled with the same urgency as doping.
The mass disqualifications at the championships in Gonda were the latest in a series of age-fraud cases in Indian sport. Less than a year earlier, about 20 teams were expelled from the country’s premier school football tournament, the Subroto Cup, for fielding overage players.
“It is endemic,” sports lawyer Aahna Mehrotra, who has authored a paper on age fraud in sport, told Reuters.
“Age fraud runs across most disciplines that have age-group competitions, 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 fragmented birth-registration system and the lack of a centralized digital database for athletes have long made it easier for unscrupulous parents and coaches to manipulate ages and exploit weaknesses in the system.
