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The task before BCCI

Transparency would solve many of IPL's chronic problems

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Business Standard Editorial Comment New Delhi
As they meet to discuss the future of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the hugely popular 20-over cricket tournament, officials of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) may want to keep two things high on the agenda. One is ensuring transparency and fairness in its dealings and the other is to explore if legalising betting on sport with necessary regulation and safeguards will help. There is little doubt that without at least ensuring transparency, the IPL, the BCCI's most lucrative property, will continue to wallow in accusations of shady dealings that could undermine this game-changer for cricket and cricketers.
 

The root of the problem lies in BCCI's chronic inability to govern itself on professional lines. As the sole authority for governing cricket in India from colonial times - it was formed in December 1928 - it had suffered all the infirmities of an established monopolist institution over a highly marketable product. Governed as a trust with little public accountability and infiltrated by powerful politicians and businessmen of questionable reputation, the BCCI's ingrained infirmities truly came under the public glare with the birth of the IPL. In the welter of controversies that have surrounded it from the start, few remember that the birth of the IPL was the result of unfair practices by the BCCI. Its forerunner was the Indian Cricket League (ICL) promoted by Subhash Chandra. True, Mr Chandra's decision to buy the country's best players for the ICL was driven by his chagrin at his broadcasting company Zee being denied the rights to telecast the national team's matches. But instead of giving credit where it was due and co-creating the tournament with Mr Chandra, the BCCI's powerful big guns reacted by killing it, after ruling that all players who participated in the ICL would be ineligible to represent their state or the national team in any other cricket tournament. They followed this up with outright plagiarism, co-opting the concept through the IPL and getting as its administrator Lalit Modi, whose dynamism was matched by a take-no-prisoners approach to business. Whether it was the nature of the auctions for teams and players, broadcast rights or sponsorship awards, everything associated with IPL became controversial.

It is ironic that the BCCI succeeded where the Australian cricket board famously failed Kerry Packer and his rival World Series Cricket (recall the coloured uniforms and night matches) in the 1970s. Where three key players in Packer's series won a legal appeal against an International Cricket Council ban, Mr Chandra lost a high court appeal to try his challenge under English law. And where the Australian cricket board was eventually forced to sign an agreement with Packer, marking a major turning point for the popularity of cricket worldwide, the IPL has leapt, unreformed, from strength to strength and controversy to controversy.

The spot-fixing scandal by the owners of two teams - that one of them is the son-in-law of the BCCI's now ousted president appeared to scandalise no one in the cricketing administration - is representative of the IPL's many organisational infirmities. The Supreme Court-appointed committee headed by Justice R M Lodha has decided to suspend two of the IPL teams for two years, but it does little to actually treat the disease. Owners are hardly the principal participants in gambling on sport. Worse, the nature of the 20-over cricket makes it ideal for spot-fixing, which is why a legalised betting format with proper regulation can become a vital mechanism for transparency; it is a mechanism in which the odds themselves could reveal irregularities. The BCCI has rarely been an agent of openness and probity. But in the interests of the thousands of young Indians who derive a decent livelihood from the IPL, it urgently needs to think in terms of sustainable reform.

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First Published: Jul 18 2015 | 9:40 PM IST

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