'Implementing reforms an opportunity rather than a challenge'

Anurag Thakur and Ajay Shirke, the newly elected BCCI president and secretary, have said they see the implementation of the Lodha Committee report as an "opportunity" rather than a challenge. They said the BCCI was in favour of reforms - "a continuing process" - even though it did not agree entirely with all the recommendations, as elaborated by Thakur's predecessor Shashank Manohar on Saturday.

"Where there is a challenge, there is opportunity," Thakur said in his first news briefing as board president on Sunday. "It depends on how you look at the scenario - you may see it as a challenge, I see it as an opportunity that this is the time to deliver."

On Saturday Manohar had reiterated that the main reason he stepped down as BCCI president was that he could not have implemented the Lodha Committee recommendations in full. According to Manohar, the BCCI was happy with 75% of the recommendations, but had strong reservations against a handful.

Thakur echoed the same sentiments. "We are not waiting for the judgement to come and then implement something. Whatever is possible and practical and required we are implementing it from time to time. And I said it is a continuous process and reforms will carry on."

Shirke, who was previously a BCCI treasurer, had stridently opposed the recommendations once they were made public on January 4. Now he said reforms did not equate to a complete structural overhaul. "Improvement in anything is a perennial process, but often improvement does not require reinventing the wheel. Minor course corrections are necessary and they will be taken as and when necessary."

In the last two months the BCCI legal counsel KK Venugopal and the lawyers representing various state associations had argued strongly against some of the Lodha Committee's recommendations in front of the two-judge bench of the Supreme Court comprising TS Thakur, the chief justice of India, and Justice Ibrahim Kalifullah. In response the court had played hardball and told the BCCI it could not function like an exclusive club any more, and that it was mandatory to implement the recommendations.

Thakur said the BCCI was not "running away", but maintained it was not "practical" to implement all the recommendations. "The world knows how successfully, transparently and in an effective manner we have run the board in the last so many years," Thakur said. "If there was any shortcoming, we have overcome that, we have tried to mend our ways. There is always a way or an area to improve and we are not running away from anything."

Manohar had said the recommendation limiting advertisement breaks only to drinks, lunch, tea and innings breaks would destroy the BCCI and bring down its revenues from an estimated INR 2000-odd crore to INR 400 crore. Thakur did not talk numbers, but stuck to a similar line of argument.

"If you look at the reports the fastest growing league in the world is IPL which is a great achievement of the BCCI," Thakur said. "They have worked well, the franchises have contributed. If you look at the other side of it, where do you get the major revenues from? It is from the home series. And your revenue comes from where? It is from the advertisements.

"And you then pay to the state associations, the team members. The state associations then create infrastructure from the money they receive from the BCCI. World over, the infrastructure is created by the government but in India the sports infrastructure for other games are created by the government [while] only for cricket the infrastructure is created by the BCCI. We don't get even a single penny from the state governments or the central government."