CoA Head Vinod Rai Confident Of Abolishing Personality-Oriented Administration In BCCI
May 11, 2017 at 10:10 PM
100 days after being appointed as the interim administrators to oversee the running of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the Committee of Administrators is hopeful that it would be able to serve the purpose it was appointed for by October.
The Supreme Court, on January 30, appointed a four-member committee of administrators headed by former Comptroller and Auditor General of India Vinod Rai to run the affairs of the Indian cricket board until the board can hold fresh elections for office bearers as per the recommendations of the Lodha Committee.
The other three members of the panel are Ramachandra Guha, the historian and cricket writer; Diana Edulji, the former India women’s captain; and Vikram Limaye, managing director and CEO of IDFC (Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation).
The committee was primarily appointed to ensure that the BCCI and its member bodies implement the Lodha panel recommendations and Vinod Rai is optimistic that they will be able to help the board implement a system that will abolish the current personality-oriented system before their tenure comes to an end in October.
“It is still a long haul, but that ends in October,” Rai told ESPNcricinfo.“I am very realistic because I don’t see a place for the CoA in the BCCI in the long term. We want to provide a structure to the BCCI. It does not have one right now. It is run by individual styles. It is personality-oriented. We will put a structure in place and ensure that there are systems that will make this structure work.”
Rai further said that the state bodies are still hesitant to implement the recommendations and have fair shares of reservations on recommendations like the one-state-one-vote policy and the 70-year age-cap for administrators.
“Each one of them has a viewpoint and all of them have filed cases against the recommendations,” he said. “I told them one fine day the court might wake up and throw every objection out and just say, ‘You don’t want to convene the AGM? Okay, [new] constitution is adopted. Full stop.’ Then they are stuck.
“I told them when they still had the time why don’t they think and then the COA will tell the court that out of the say 20 recommendations, 18 are adopted. The court might just accede or may not, but at least you will give the court the impression that by and large, you have accepted the recommendations,” he added.
Speaking about his interactions with the state bodies during the recently-concluded Special General Meeting, the CoA head said that the state officials possess positive thinking before adding that their knowledge is too limited.
The majority of the state bodies were in favour of boycotting the ICC Champions Trophy due to ICC’s newly-planned revenue model but the BCCI had to announce the team after the CoA ordered them to do so.
“They are all positively oriented, thinking people. The only thing is their thinking and their perspective was exceedingly narrow,” Rai said. “They just did not know that there was an ICC governance model and a finance model. And the finance model, as far as we are concerned, is crumbs.
“I told them if the BCCI members had decided to withdraw from the ICC on the basis of the differences on the governance model, the CoA will back them. But not on the finance model. You cannot put Indian cricket at risk,” he added.