BCCI remains outside the RTI’s jurisdiction because it is not a public authority

PIRCTURE THIS. A dropped catch in Chennai sets off lakhs of WhatsApp forwards. A captain’s resignation becomes the only topic at dinner tables from Kolkata to Kinshasa. A disputed umpiring call—40 seconds of cricket—outlasts that evening’s parliamentary cover­age on prime-time television. Indian cricket doesn’t just entertain. It governs the national mood.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the institu­tion that governs this emotional republic of cricket, represents one of the most remarkable case studies in sport economics globally. What began as a colonial-era administrative body for cricket in British India has evolved, over the past two decades and especially since the Indian Premier League’s (IPL) launch in 2008, into a dominant financial force in global cricket—all without receiving a single rupee of government support.

Its revenue model is built on four pillars: IPL’s world-class media rights deals; international cricket broadcasting; the In­ternational Cricket Council’s (ICC) market-reflective revenue distribution; and a growing investment corpus. The common thread running through all the four is India’s unmatched cricket audience, which makes every piece of cricket broadcast featuring India more valuable than any broadcast without it.

This creates a self-reinforcing dynamic: audience drives broadcast value, broadcast value drives commercial revenues, commercial revenues build reserves and fund infrastructure, and infrastructure develops talent that sustains the audience. BCCI has managed this flywheel with considerable commercial sophistication, and the result is an economic moat around Indian cricket that no rival board can credibly threaten.

BCCI is not merely the richest cricket board. It is the organisa­tion whose commercial gravity defines what cricket as a global sport is worth—to broadcasters, to sponsors, and to ICC itself. Understanding Indian cricket’s economics is, in large part, un­derstanding the economics of cricket as a global game.

This intricate and high-value ecosystem is shaped not merely by administrative decisions made in boardrooms but by a com­plex interplay of market forces, contractual arrangements, and international commercial dynamics that have taken decades to construct. To superimpose a model of oversight premised solely on governmental control may fail to account for these realities—and could risk unintended consequences, including inefficien­cies or disruptions in a finely balanced economic structure.

The experience across sectors also counsels caution. The belief in regulation as an automatic guarantor of fairness is, on examina­tion, misplaced. Legislative and executive interventions, however well-intentioned, have, at times, produced outcomes marked by inefficiency, exclusion, or distortion, owing to challenges in implementation, lack of contextual sensitivity, or concentration of authority. Fairness, therefore, is not an inevitable byproduct of control; it is contingent upon transparency, accountability, and the careful calibration of regulatory mechanisms to the specific domain in question.

In this backdrop, it may not be appropriate to proceed on the assumption that increased governmental supervision would, in and of itself, enhance the functioning or fairness of institutions such as BCCI. The issue is not merely whether there should be oversight, but the nature, extent, and suitability of such oversight in light of the economic and structural realities involved. That more nuanced question—one the Right to Information (RTI) Act’s framework was never designed to resolve—is precisely what brings us to the legal debate.

But the fact that BCCI commands immense public attention and exercises undeniable influence makes a case, in some quar­ters, for bringing the board under the ambit of the RTI Act. The RTI Act of 2005 is one of independent India’s more remarkable pieces of legislation. It handed ordinary citizens a crowbar they could use against the state—the right to demand answers from public authorities. But who counts as public authority? The Cen­tral Information Commission (CIC) had to ask, and then answer, this question about BCCI. The Madras High Court had directed a fresh look and the answer, when it came, was grounded not in the passion of packed stadiums but in the dry, disciplined grammar of Section 2(h) of the RTI Act.

There is a temptation—understandable and entirely hu­man—to feel that Indian cricket belongs to the public the way a post office or a municipality does. The Tricolour flies in the packed arenas where cricket is played. Victories produce spon­taneous street celebrations and defeats trigger something close to collective grief. Doesn’t all of that make BCCI, somehow, ‘Ours’?

The law has a firm answer: not quite. Section 2(h) of the RTI Act is specific about what qualifies as public authority. The body must have been established by the Constitution, created through legislation, set up by government notification, or owned, con­trolled, or substantially financed by the government. BCCI ticks none of these boxes. It was registered in 1928 under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act, runs on its own constitution, and receives no government grants or subsidies whatsoever. It is, in the eyes of the law, a private autonomous society.

Indeed, BCCI has repeatedly maintained before the courts that the Indian cricket team is the “official team of the BCCI”. In cricketing language, public perception may appeal loudly from the stands, but legal adjudication must remain within the bound­ary lines marked by the statute.

To understand how BCCI became this colossus, you have to go back to a simpler time—when cricket boards subsisted on gate receipts, modest sponsorships, and an occasional hat-tip from the state. The 1983 World Cup lit a fuse; the economic liberalisation in the 1990s poured fuel on it; and satellite television turned cricket into India’s dominant entertainment product.

And then came IPL. IPL didn’t just change cricket’s format. It re­wired the economics of the entire sport globally. It fused franchise culture, Bollywood glamour, advertising muscle, and broadcast revenues into something the world had never quite seen. Interna­tional players began migrating towards India’s cricket economy the way one generation of cricketers had migrated towards Eng­lish county cricket—except the IPL paid considerably better.

IPL has evolved into one of the most valuable sport leagues in the world on a per-match basis, rivalled only by competitions such as the National Football League (NFL) in the US. IPL’s 2023-27 media rights deal is valued at `48,390 crore (based on number of matches) for BCCI from broadcasting alone. When combined with sponsorships, franchise fees, and matchday revenues, IPL contributes roughly 60 per cent of BCCI’s total income.

With revenues exceeding `18,200 crore in fiscal 2024-25, vast financial reserves of around `18,400 crore, and a dominant share of global cricket income, BCCI has not only outpaced its peers—it has fundamentally reshaped the economic structure of the sport itself. Today, BCCI holds reserves approaching `30,000 crore, earns nearly `1,000 crore a year in investment income alone, and receives approximately 38.5 per cent of all ICC revenues. India doesn’t just play cricket, it bankrolls it. But wealth, influence and dominance do not automatically convert a private body into a public authority.

The Supreme Court’s landmark judg­ment in BCCI vs Cricket Association of Bihar is frequently misquoted in this debate. The apex court pushed for transparency and gov­ernance reform through this judgment. The Lodha Committee emerged from concerns about conflicts of interest raised by the apex court’s order. But the court did not declare BCCI a public authority under the RTI Act.

The RTI debate is, at its core, a debate about what kind of institution BCCI should be—not merely what kind of institution it legally is. That debate belongs in Parliament, in the press, in public discourse, and ultimately at the ballot box. It does not belong before the CIC, which has neither the statutory author­ity nor the democratic mandate to resolve it through interpretive expansion beyond what the law actually says.

There is a story—possibly apocryphal, as the best cricketing stories tend to be—about Sunil Gavaskar on India’s brutal tours of the Caribbean in the 1970s. Facing Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, and Colin Croft on pitches that seemed designed to induce something between physical injury and existential dread, Gavaskar was once asked how he survived. His reply, as the anecdote has it, was characteristically spare: “Know where your off-stump is.”

Put simply, it’s neither courage nor aggression. Not technique in the abstract—know the exact location of the one thing most es­sential to protect, and everything else flows from that clarity. The commission knew precisely where its off-stump was—Section 2(h), not a millimetre outside it. That discipline is not timidity; it is what separates judicial reasoning from political advocacy.

But citizens, journalists, and policymakers who believe In­dian cricket’s governance ought to be accountable to the public that sustains it are not bound by Section 2(h). They are not adju­dicating statutory interpretation. They are asking a question of democratic legitimacy—and that question has no legal answer.

The task is not to decide whether greater transparency in crick­et administration would be good for India. It almost certainly would be. The task is to determine whether BCCI falls within Section 2(h). Precedents—from Zee Telefilms to Thalappalam Service Cooperative Bank to Dalco Engineering—point in one direction. BCCI, for all its size and swagger, does not qualify.

Cricket teaches patience better than most things. A Test match is not won by impulse. A reform worth making is not achieved by interpretive shortcuts. The law, much like a disciplined opening batter on a difficult morning wicket, proceeds one ball at a time.

(PR Ramesh is a Central Information Commissioner. This essay reflects the legal principles that shaped his order to keep BCCI out of the ambit of the RTI Act. View s are personal)