Vinay Rao
Here’s a question that sounds simple but isn’t: should the richest, best-run sports body in India have to follow the same rules as every other one?
That’s what the Supreme Court asked BCCI on 8 September 2026. Not “you’re guilty of something.” Just: explain yourself. Why shouldn’t you and every state cricket association come under the new National Sports Governance Act?
BCCI has been dodging that question for years. Now it has to actually answer it.
The Law, in Plain Terms
Think of the National Sports Governance Act as a rulebook the government wrote for every sport in the country — how long officials can stay in power, how elections should be run, who investigates when something goes wrong. It sets up three new things: a Board to register sports bodies and keep them in line, a panel of retired election officers to run their internal elections fairly, and a special court — a Tribunal — just for sports disputes, so cases don’t drag through the regular court system for a decade.
Here’s the catch, though, and it’s a big one: the law only kicks in for a sport once the government formally “designates” it. Cricket hasn’t been designated. So right now, technically, this law might not even apply to BCCI at all — not because of any grand legal argument, just because nobody’s filled out that particular piece of paperwork yet. That’s the loophole BCCI is leaning on hardest.
What Changes If Cricket Gets Pulled In
If the government does designate cricket, a few very concrete things shift.
Officials get a bit more room to stay in their jobs — three terms in a row of four years each, then a one-term break, versus BCCI’s current stricter setup. And every recognised sports body automatically becomes answerable under the Right to Information Act. That means the public could actually ask BCCI: how much did you earn, where did it go, why did you make that decision? Right now, it doesn’t have to answer any of that.
There’s a genuinely good reason this law exists. Indian cricket’s governance fights have dragged on since 2014 — hundreds of separate court applications, endless committees, endless delay. The new Tribunal is meant to fix exactly that: retired judges hearing sports cases quickly, with one clean appeal route to the Supreme Court, instead of the current mess. If you’ve ever wondered why a single governance dispute in cricket can take years to resolve, this is the fix that was designed for that problem.
Why BCCI Still Doesn’t Want In
BCCI’s pushback isn’t just stubbornness, though. It already cleaned up its own act a decade ago — the Lodha Committee reforms gave it cooling-off periods, term limits, and a rule that one person can’t quietly hold two posts at once, and in some ways that rule is stricter than what this new law asks for. BCCI also doesn’t take a rupee from the government, which has always been its trump card: no government money, no government strings.
And even if the government does eventually bring cricket under this law, there’s an escape hatch built right into it — the government can exempt any sports body from some or all of the rules, if it talks to the sport’s international federation first. So this isn’t really a yes-or-no fight. There’s a very real middle path where cricket gets partly covered, on BCCI’s terms, and everyone quietly moves on.
There’s also a fair point buried in BCCI’s resistance: this law was written with smaller, often struggling sports federations in mind. Cricket isn’t struggling. It runs the IPL, fills stadiums, and turns a profit most other sports in India can only dream of. A rulebook built for the many might not fit the one sport that’s already working.
What This Means Closer to Home
HCA’s situation makes this whole debate feel less abstract. Right now, Hyderabad cricket is being run by a court-appointed committee, with an ombudsman complaint, contempt cases, and appeals all moving through the Telangana High Court at once. If this law ever reaches state associations, a lot of that could shift to the new sports Tribunal instead — which could genuinely simplify things for an association juggling several court battles at the same time.
But it cuts the other way too. The new law lists exactly the kind of problems that could get a body suspended — skipped elections, unpublished accounts, misused funds — and those are uncomfortably close to the issues that have kept HCA under supervision. So this law wouldn’t just offer relief. It would also mean sharper, more formal scrutiny.
So, Good Thing or Bad Thing?
Nothing is settled yet — the Court comes back to this on 27 October 2026. But it’s worth resisting the urge to pick a side too quickly. This isn’t corrupt old BCCI versus a clean new law. It’s a real question: is Indian cricket better off with the reforms it already fought hard to win for itself, or does it need the same rulebook as every other sport? Smart people who genuinely want cricket to succeed land on both sides of that.
