Suneel Vatsyayan

In 1987 Vatsyayan joined Navjyoti, the Delhi Police foundation for correction, de-addiction and rehabilitation, as its founding director, and led it for twelve years. There he helped develop community-based models of addiction treatment and rehabilitation, including police-community partnerships, peer-led recovery approaches and combined medical, psychological, social and spiritual models of care. Services were extended to prisons, women, children and families, and recovering users were trained as peer educators with support from the United Nations International Drug Control Programme.

Nada began working in India in 1999 under the supervision of Michael O. Smith, the founder of NADA in the United States, with the aim of making barrier-free addiction treatment available in communities. Nada India Foundation was formally registered as an independent civil society organisation on 15 March 2001, with Vatsyayan as its founding chairperson.

Under his leadership the foundation has promoted the NADA ear acupuncture, or acudetox, protocol as the South Asian focal point for the method, alongside peer education, capacity building for drug rehabilitation centres, youth leadership programmes and advocacy on tobacco taxation and control. Its campaigns include A DATE, which promotes drug, alcohol and tobacco free environments in schools, campuses and workplaces, and the Go Green and Healthy Campus programme.[2][3][4]