Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

‘worried about India’, he told this writer, with its ‘huge pressures of population and poverty’, yet a privileged elite ‘who are incredibly rich and very callous.’ ‘Why don’t they [the masses] rise up?’ he asked rhetorically: ‘Only religion and belief in another life hold it together.’ While he was being worn down by the suffocating blanket of government and sporting bureaucracy, he was observing the problems of a whole society revealed in the successes and excesses of Indian cricket. * * * * * ‘Twenty to 25 years ago cricket and hockey were about same size in India. Cricket was privatised, hockey remains in the public sector, basically run by government.’ But privatisation effectively meant control by politicians, not bureaucrats. ‘Politicians run cricket. The chairman of the BCCI [the Board of Control for Cricket in India] is a politician and he can only be a politician because to get elected as chairman of the BCCI you need connections all around the country.’ The BCCI is a charitable trust exempt from taxation, registered as such ‘under Section 12 (a) of the Income Tax Act to promote cricket for the general public good’ and enjoying ‘tax exemption under Section 11.’ This, said Ric, enabled it to ‘turn over a huge amount of money: last year the BCCI made two billion dollars and this is in a country of incredible penury.’ In the same vein, he told the ABC’s Monica Attard that an income of about two billion dollars ‘in a country like India’ is ‘obscene but I don’t see people commenting or writing about it or even being concerned about it.’ Ric clearly felt that the money flowing into the BCCI was not trickling down in significant amounts to the game’s grassroots. Asked by Attard whether the commercialisation of cricket in India had ‘added anything, made it any better,’ Ric responded: Well you would hope so. I’m not sure that they have anything like the development programs or anything for young people who want to enjoy and just play cricket in the way that we understand in this country [Australia] or even the culture of playing the game. What they have is 1.2 billion people, many of whom love to play the game they play in their backyards and out in the streets and some of whom are successful, but largely 88 2002-2009