The growing rift among the board members of the National Cricket Academy erupted in the open on Monday with a key functionary questioning the “restructuring policy” as well as working procedure at the academy.
Biswarup Dey, who is one of the members of the NCA board, openly questioned the “lackadaisical attitude” of the committee members at a time when NCA’s working policy is set to be entirely revamped. “NCA has been the pride of Indian cricket but the way it is being run at the moment is very disappointing. No one has any clue about how restructuring is being done. There was suppose to be a meeting of the NCA board in June and we are now at the end of July, but I haven’t heard of anything yet,” an upset Dey said on Monday.
Dey also questioned as to what BCCI’s game development manager Ratnakar Shetty was doing as he was entrusted with the duty of setting up the module for restructuring. “Shetty was supposed to come back to us with an exhaustive module. But this hasn’t happened. I would like to know that how are the vacancies created after a few got pink-slips would be filled? It’s been quite some time now. If it is delayed further, it will only hurt NCA’s progress,” Dey added.
When Shetty was asked about the meeting in June being deferred, he said, “The chairman of the NCA board (Ranjib Biswal) was in England with the India team and that’s why the meeting couldn’t be slotted. But restructuring is going on and we will soon announce the date of the meeting.”
Dey was not ready to buy the argument that Biswal’s absence was the reason for the delay.
“The NCA specifically has a post called vice-chairman (Sunil Dev) who is authorised to conduct the meeting in chairman’s absence. Was Dev ever contacted and told to preside over the meeting?” Dey questioned
“I am not counting myself out but none of us in the last one year have ever visited the NCA in the capacity of committee members to keep a tab on the proceedings. I put this on record,” Dey said.
Apart from Dey, Biswal and Dev, the other members are Kashi Viswanathan, Rakesh Parikh, Gyanendra Pandey, Chetan Desai and Bikash Baruah.
There are also issues about the huge difference in payments between the visiting faculty for the camp (Sanjay Bangar, Deep Dasgupta and Sunil Joshi) and specialist coaches (Paras Mhambrey and Narendra Hirwani).
When a BCCI official was asked this question, he replied, “I don’t know why Hirwani and Mhambrey has been dubbed as specialist coaches while Bangar, Dasgupta and Joshi are being clubbed in the visiting faculty category.”