BCCI AGM to be held on September 21

The BCCI's annual general meeting will be on September 21 at its headquarters in Mumbai. The date was decided upon by the board's working committee, which met in Delhi on Monday.

"[The AGM] will be held as per the existing constitution," BCCI president Anurag Thakur said after the meeting.

There was doubt over whether the BCCI would postpone the AGM in the wake of its resistance to implementing the recommendations of the Lodha Committee as ordered by the Supreme Court. Although it had told the Lodha Committee that it will comply with the timelines drawn up to implement the various recommendations, the BCCI recently filed a petition in the Supreme Court asking a Constitutional bench to review the original order.

According to a Lodha Committee official, the BCCI's decision to conduct an AGM without first implementing reforms - which include changes to its constitution - is "meaningless". The panel will in any case conduct fresh elections at a later date once the board meets the initial set of reform deadlines, the official said. "As per our schedule, the AGM would come later. So this is meaningless," the official told ESPNcricinfo. "This will just be treated as a general body meeting."

According to the official, once the new memorandum of rules is adopted by the states, they will conduct their own elections. "Then they will be able to send nominees for the BCCI to have its AGM and elections."

Incidentally, in a media release outlining the decisions taken at the working committee, BCCI secretary Ajay Shirke did not make the mention of the AGM at all. Asked whether the BCCI was adhering to timelines laid out by the Lodha Committee, Thakur said that the board will wait for the outcome of the review petition filed in the court. "We have already filed a review petition," he said. "The state associations have been supplied with the [review petition] document given to us."

On July 18, the Supreme Court had signed off on a majority of the Lodha Committee's recommendations, and given the BCCI a maximum of six months to implement them. The Lodha Committee, the court had said, would oversee the implementation, and draw up a timeline for the process. On August 9, the committee handed over to the BCCI its first set of timelines; the first phase of reform, comprising recommendations on 11 topics with sub-divisions, is to be completed by October 15.