Deccan Chronicle:Sreenivasa Raghavan: Saturday, September, 03, 2011.
Former Union minister and MP Shashi Tharoor has come out in support of the National Sports Development Bill which has not met with the approval of the Union Cabinet.
“I’m for transparency and accountability in all sporting bodies of public interest,” Mr Tharoor told the Deccan Chronicle. Kozhikode Cricket Association secretary and Socialist Janata Dal MLA Sreyams Kumar too feels there’s nothing wrong in bringing sports bodies under the Right To Information Act. “You need to be afraid of this only if you’ve something to hide,” he said.
A hapless Union sports minister Ajay Maken, who was asked to revise the Bill, had tweeted earlier: “We don’t want to be intrusive, but we want BCCI and others to be transparent and efficient.”
Mr Maken, who found his bitterest critic in former BCCI president and International Cricket Council (ICC) chief Sharad Pawar, has, however, found support from various quarters in Kerala, where the issue of bringing sports bodies of the country under RTI is of particular significance considering the corruption charges against KCA.
“When you bring sports bodies under the RTI things will change. There’s no accountability in the system at present,” deplored Kerala Cricketers’ Forum spokesman K. Balaji Iyengar who felt that bringing RTI into the picture would prevent under-the-carpet deals.
“Such deals are widely prevalent in many sports bodies including KCA and to a large extent in the BCCI”, he claimed.
While the BCCI has succeeded in playing spoilsport where the Bill is concerned for now, will it get run out as this match progresses is a question most sports lovers would love to have an answer to.
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