NEW DELHI: BCCI president Sourav Ganguly and Indian cricket board secretary Jay Shah will remain in their posts for at least another two weeks after a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) SA Bobde agreed to hear the BCCI’s application, seeking modification of its constitution.
Going by the Justice Lodha committee recommendations, which had been signed into law by the Supreme Court in 2016, Shah’s tenure ended on May 7 while Ganguly’s term comes to an end on July 27.
Incidentally, it was on July 18, 2016, that the final order on the matter was delivered by a two-Judge Bench comprising then Chief Justice TS Thakur and Justice Ibrahim Kalifulla. The Bench had then signed off on most of the Lodha proposals, setting in motion a major revamp of the way cricket is run in India.
That was then.
In the civil appeal filed on April 21, the BCCI, among other requests, asked the Supreme Court to separate the tenures of office-bearers of the BCCI and the state associations before serving mandatory cooling-off periods. The BCCI petition seeks an extension of Ganguly and Shah’s tenures till 2025. Ganguly and Shah took charge as BCCI president and secretary, respectively, in October 2019 and have sought this constitutional change so that they can continue in their positions in the Indian cricket board.
The BCCI has also requested India’s apex court to do away with a clause allowing any amendment to the BCCI constitution only with the Supreme Court’s approval.
As per the new constitution, an administrator can only serve six years on the trot at the state association or the board or a combination of both. After the completion of six years, the administrator has to serve a mandatory ‘cooling-off’ period. Both Sourav Ganguly and Shah had served as administrators in state associations before being elected as BCCI officials.
The Lodha committee was constituted in January 2015 by the apex court to examine and make suitable recommendations for effective working of BCCI and state cricket associations.
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