CoA not proactive enough: Lodha

Mumbai: Justice R.M. Lodha, who heads the committee that recommended sweeping changes for Indian cricket, has expressed concerns over the cricket board and the Committee of Administrators in implementing the structural reforms, approved by the Supreme Court, about a year back.

The Supreme Court, in July last year, had accepted the recommendations of the Lodha Committee reforms, which included a bar on ministers and civil servants above the age of 70 being BCCI officials.

Justice. Lodha was unhappy with particularly the Committee of Administrators, who according to him, were not “proactive enough”.

“Had the CoA been proactive, by this time the Supreme Court order and reforms would have been in place. Unfortunately, I think, they have involved themselves in incidental matters instead of taking the reforms forward and implementing the order which was the main brief given to them,”  he said.

Lodha also felt that the resignation of CoA member Ramachandra Guha, who quit as BCCI administrator last month, was mostly due to the lack of functioning of the committee.

“The CoA are doing their job. But maybe they spend a lot of their time in these contractual and administrative matters, whereas the focus should have been the implementation of the court order because that was the primary task.

“Everything else was incidental. Maybe, as the reports have come, one of their members has resigned, so maybe the things aren’t going on smoothly. I don’t know; it’s all conjecture and surmise,” he added.

The 67-year-old also stated that the BCCI continued to ignore the recommendations and avoided to implement the order.

“The fact of the matter is the BCCI actually continues to defy and not implement the SC order. The CoA, being a body appointed by the court, must have been actually proactive and the focus ought to have been implementation of the order,” he said.