Not cricket

Cynics have long maintained that BCCI could stand for the Board for Control of Cricket Income in India. The escalating controversy over awarding telecast rights for international matches only strengthens that notion.

The growing tendency for politicians with a passing knowledge of the game to try and capture the body, testifies to exactly the same thing. And the myriad court cases in which the telecast and election issues are now mired certainly suggests that BCCI is in urgent need of reform. If the change will not come through internal processes, it must be engineered from outside.

For, no organisation with a national mandate should be awarding telecast rights for the country's most popular sport to a sports channel that is yet to be born, and when its action is challenged by a rival TV channel, award it to a third and then a fourth channel, both of whom had lost out in the initial bidding.

All of which has raised the question of BCCI's legal status. In theory, a private organisation (and BCCI is such) can be as arbitrary as it wishes in awarding contracts, and it can have a boss for life if it so chooses.

But representative bodies need rotation of control, and fairness is enjoined if you are the state""whence the government's plea that since BCCI is the national cricket body, it has taken on some of the burden of being the state.

This argument may or may not stand the test of judicial scrutiny, but the government has two or three easy ways in which it can force BCCI to change.

One would be to withdraw the recognition it enjoys as a national sports body if it does not take certain critical reform measures, like having properly organised elections. Another would be to withdraw BCCI's tax-free status. The point is obvious: the government need not be a helpless spectator.

However, government intervention is always open to the risk of more bad precedents, and of politicians and bureaucrats taking the cream for themselves. Much the better option, therefore, is for BCCI to reform itself.

This is best done by looking at changes in other countries where cricket is played (Australia and New Zealand are good examples), or at other sports.

The obvious organisational change would be to convert what is now a private club into a listed company, and then be accountable in an open way for what goes on in terms of quality stadia being built and a properly organised domestic cricket season being arranged.