Amitabh Choudhary, the BCCI’s acting secretary, has clarified that Niranjan Shah is a ‘special invitee’ and not a full member of the panel set up by the board to identify difficulties in implementing the Lodha Committee’s reforms © PTI
The BCCI has said it is getting closer to narrowing down its list of difficulties in implementing the Lodha Committee’s reforms to “three or four”. The seven-member panel set up by the BCCI to study their implementation met on Saturday, and achieved a “huge amount of unanimity”, according to its convener, the BCCI’s acting secretary Amitabh Choudhary.
The panel is set to meet again on July 7, when it will look to finalise a report that it will present before a Special General Meeting (SGM) that the BCCI will have to conduct before July 14, when the Supreme Court will next hear the case. Following the SGM, the BCCI will hand over its final list of difficulties to the Committee of Administrators, the court-appointed panel tasked with running the BCCI until fresh elections under the Lodha guidelines.
“I can tell you that there was a huge amount of unanimity among all members including [Cricket Association of Bengal president] Sourav Ganguly, who was present through Skype,” Choudhary said on Saturday.
He added that the members had agreed unanimously on “six or seven” points, but did not want to reveal what they were until they had been narrowed down to a final “three or four”. He indicated that the unanimously agreed-upon areas of difficulty were ones the BCCI had already spoken about in the past.
The board is understood to be inclined to incorporate most of the Lodha committee’s recommendations, except for policies such as the age cap of 70 years for office bearers, the tenure cap of nine years with cooling-off periods in between, the one-state-one-vote policy, and the trimming down of the number of selectors from five to three.
“I could well do that [reveal the six or seven areas of difficulty], but I think all of you know it,” Choudhary said. “We are trying to reduce the gamut of difficulties to three or four, and in that exercise we have succeeded very substantially today. The small bits which are left we will finish them [on July 7].
“[By then,] instead of talking about 5-6-7 points, I’m certain that I will be talking about three or four only. The other three will unnecessarily get attention [otherwise].”
Choudhary was confident the BCCI would be able to conduct a Special General Meeting (SGM) before July 14.
“I’m sure you’ll have a copy of that one-page document which states clearly, delineates, that the honourable Supreme Court of India’s next date on the subject is the 14th of July,” Choudhary said. “It also says that we have to dispose this matter expeditiously, and it’s a matter of urgent nature. We exhausted the dictionary, so to say, and we are acting upon it.”
On the question of Niranjan Shah’s presence in the BCCI’s committee, Choudhary clarified that the former Saurashtra Cricket Association (SCA) president was only part of it as a “special invitee” rather than one of the seven full members. Shah is at present disqualified from holding office either in the BCCI or any of its state associations since he is over the stipulated age limit of 70. Choudhary dismissed any confusion over Shah’s role in the panel as an issue of “semantics”.
“He’s a special invitee,” Choudhary said. “You are getting into semantics. By trying to distinguish between the technical status of a person who’s attending the meeting… I have answered your question, whether he is a member or an invitee. I said he’s an invitee.”
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Source: ESPN Crickinfo