India has long resisted signing the World Anti-Doping Code, which is mandatory for all countries participating in world sport. That, though, could change soon as the Sports Ministry indicates it has given its assent and referred the matter to the cabinet.‘‘The matter has been cleared by our ministry’’, said Minister of State Vijay Goel, adding the the delay was in getting the documents circulated to the other ministries in the cabinet. ‘‘We will be circulating the note to all the others soon for an approval from the cabinet. Within a month we should be ready to sign the Code,’’ Goel said.The Code, evolved by the World Anti-Doping Agency at its Denmark conference last year, formulates uniform rules and penalties across the world against doping. It is seen as the first-ever concerted international move to check doping in sport, an issue that has assumed significance over the past few months.India is among the 15 countries — others include Azerbaijan, Latvia, Mali, Oman and Togo — that didn’t sign the Code but pledged to do so at a later date. Soon after the Copenhagen conference, sports minister Vikram Verma had told this paper that the government was not interested in signing the Code because it was developed ‘‘by an NGO’’.‘‘We will sign an agreement only with UNESCO,’’ he’d said, perhaps unaware that the UN body is working towards getting governments to sign on to, and implement, the Code. The government’s ambivalence all this time had not, however, prevented senior officials of the Sports Ministry from making frequent foreign trips to attend international conferences on doping.Two senior officials of the sports ministry — JP Singh, director-general of the Sports Authority of India (SAI) and MK Mishra, an Executive Director in SAI — are currently in Paris for an eight-day conference, organised by WADA and UNESCO, on doping.This is the third trip in the recent past to WADA conferences (others were in Copenhagen and Kuala Lumpur), an interesting statistic given that the Sports Ministry had, till now, no idea when it would sign the Code.
