Vinay Rao
(……Continued) The payment itself is no longer the issue.
The court has directed that the arrears be released, and that direction deserves to be respected. But once the money begins to move, another process begins with it. Nine years of unanswered questions will inevitably follow.
Every rupee released under the banner of a Cricket Development Fund carries with it an expectation of accountability.
Players who represented these clubs during those years are entitled to ask how a fund created in the name of cricket was actually spent. Parents who bore the cost of coaching, equipment and travel for young cricketers have every reason to seek answers. So too do members of the public concerned with the functioning of an association that performs important public functions in the administration of cricket.
The class of persons with sufficient standing to question the utilisation of these funds is considerably wider than many club office-bearers may imagine.
Nor have HCA’s own rules disappeared simply because the arrears are now being released.
Rule 4(2) remains part of the Bye-Laws. It provides that a member which fails to submit accounts relating to grants received from HCA forfeits its entitlement to further grants until compliance is achieved.
That obligation applies not only to the past, but also to every future cycle of funding.
Equally, the Auditor’s duty under Rules 34(4) and 34(5) to verify the utilisation of grants and submit a Compliance Report continues to exist. Those provisions were framed for a reason. Transparency is not an optional exercise to be undertaken only when controversy arises; it is a continuing obligation built into HCA’s own constitutional framework.
The office-bearer who receives nine years of Cricket Development Fund arrears today may well have had no connection with the club during much of that period. Yet once the money is received, the responsibility to account for it cannot simply be wished away.
Also read: https://orangenews9.com/three-lakhs-a-year-nine-years-not-one-question-about-cricket-part-i/
Sooner or later, someone will ask a simple question: What did this fund actually develop?
The answer cannot be “Nothing.”
The Questions That Still Await Answers
The recent judgment has settled one legal issue.
It has not settled the larger questions that continue to hang over Hyderabad cricket.
What, in law, is a “private club” under HCA’s governing documents?
Who is the true beneficiary of a Development Fund released nearly a decade after it was first promised—the office-bearers who receive the cheque today, or the players who represented those clubs through those years?
Were earlier grants utilised for cricket, and if so, where is the evidence?
If they were not, why were further grants contemplated without enforcing the accounting obligations contained in HCA’s own Bye-Laws?
Most importantly, where is the cricket that this so-called Cricket Development Fund was meant to develop?
These are not difficult questions.
They are the questions any cricketer, any parent who has invested in a child’s sporting future, and any cricket lover who has watched the steady decline of Hyderabad cricket over the past decade would instinctively ask.
The court cannot be criticised for not answering questions that were never placed before it.
Its duty was to decide the dispute before it, and it did exactly that.
But the responsibility for asking the right questions rests elsewhere.
Those questions have not disappeared.
Also read: https://orangenews9.com/the-comfortable-fiction-nobody-wants-to-disturb-part-ii/
They remain buried in accounts that were never produced, in compliance reports that were never discussed, in grounds that were never built, in coaching programmes that never materialised, and in generations of young cricketers who continued to finance their own aspirations while a Cricket Development Fund existed largely on paper.
For too long, Hyderabad cricket has allowed politics to occupy the space where player development should have stood.
That is the real issue.
Not the payment.
Not the arrears.
Not even the litigation.
The real issue is whether a fund established in the name of cricket ever truly served the interests of cricket.
If it did, the evidence should be easy to produce.
If it did not, then the questions raised today will only grow louder tomorrow.
Because in the end, every public institution is judged not by the resolutions it passes or the money it distributes, but by the purpose it fulfils.
A Cricket Development Fund that cannot demonstrate cricket development invites only one inevitable question:
What, exactly, was it developing? (Concluded)
