The BCCI’s (Board of Control for Cricket in India) decision to release Rs 10 crores for assisting India’s Olympic campaign in Tokyo has not successful with a few associations. The representatives did not speak about any concern during the zonal videoconferencing meet on Sunday. The apex council stamped the decision and also pointed out that the previous experience with the Sports Ministry was far from being pleasant.
Back in 2008, the BCCI had set corpus for Rs 50 crores for a joint venture along with the Ministry for what was to be called National Sports Development Fund (NSDF). Former BCCI’s chief administrative officer, Ratnakar Shetty said that the ministry never provided details of how the fund was utilised. He informed Sportstar on Monday, “The NSDF was to be formed with a corpus of Rs 80 crores -with the Ministry of Sports to contribute remaining Rs 30 crores. After 2010 Commonwealth Games, there was no sign of detailed report about the utilisation of funds.”
He further added, “I filed an RTI (Right To Information) in a personal capacity and the reply was shocking; only Rs right crores was spent. It is nice that the BCCI wants to support other sports but it should first ask what’s happened to the money that was already donated. What was it utilised for? It was remarked that supporting other sports was not an object of the BCCI as defined in the memorandum of association and the BCCI’s appeal is still pending in the Bombay High Court.”