Cricket board plays hide and seek with Lodha panel

Soon, the Indian cricket board might cry before the Supreme Court in a filmi style that "tareekh pe tareekh, tareekh pe tareekh, tareekh pe tareekh milti gayi My Lord, per insaaf nahi mila! -- got date after date, date after date, date after date, My Lord, but no justice.

The Supreme Court is unwilling to show any mercy on the board after it tried to defy it by dilly-dallying in implementing recommendations of its appointed Rajendra Mal Lodha Committee.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Tirath Singh Thakur, in a surprise move, gave the order without any notice of putting in the court's cause list. The idea is to choke the board and its affiliates of any money from their banks till they fall in line.

The Lodha Committee will now fix a ceiling for contracts the BCCI can enter into and anything beyond that limit would require approval. The committee will also appoint an independent auditor to scrutinise the BCCI accounts and fix the financial limits for contracts.

The court ordered board president and secretary to file compliance reports before the Committee and the Supreme Court in two weeks. The time is clearly running out for the board, but it still has some other avenues to prolong the litigation.

This is one way of telling the two senior board officials to go to the committee and sort out any problems they have in implementation of any recommendations.

It's bizarre, Supreme Court keeps threatening that board that it should fall in line and implement the reforms recommended by the Lodha Committee to make its style of governance transparent. After each date of hearing, the apex court keeps squeezing the board financially.

The court has thus taken notice of the board's move to open the bids for media rights of the Indian Premier League (IPL) for a 10year period from 2018 and said it cannot fix on its own the property's worth without the consent of the Lodha Committee.

Last time the IPL media rights went for some $1.6 billion and this time it is likely to go for anwhere between $4 billion to $5 billion. Will the Lodha Committee clear the figure? Simple, it will allow, provided the board accepts its recommendations.

In other words, the court has made Justice Lodha the pointsman to run the board till the cricket administrators "fall in line" and force its affiliates also to do the same. One question being asked on social media is why pick on the cricket board when even Justice Lodha agrees that it is still the best administered comparable with any sports body anywhere in the world for sheer amount of work it does in organising the sport for all age groups? The number of match days in a season is mind-boggling.

As Justice Lodha said, the Supreme Court has done its best to have the board implement the reforms suggested by his committee, but it has also realised that is not easy to deal with so many stakeholders with a judgment in one stroke.

The board officials must sit with the Lodha Committee and sort out the serious issues affecting its administrative structure instead of standing on prestige.