IPL has to get more professional

The weekend auctions have demonstrated that the Indian Premier League (IPL) continues to be the world's fastest-growing sports league despite the allegations which saw the ousting of the commissioner who ran it for the first three years of its existence.
Indian opener Gautam Gambhir was bought for a whopping $2.4 million (Rs 11.04 crore) per season. Gambhir, it is said, will earn almost as much in a week as the English Premier League's (EPL's ) best-known footballer Wayne Rooney. The essential difference, of course, is that the IPL is played for seven weeks every summer while the EPL begins in August and ends in May!

The question could also be asked whether IPL is fulfilling its objective of promoting domestic cricket by discovering and rewarding new talent. Australian allrounder Daniel Christian was snapped up by Deccan Chargers for $900,000 (Rs 4.1 crore).

Uncapped Indian players — those who have not represented the country — cannot be sold in the IPL auction. The 21-year-old Manish Pandey, the first Indian to score a century in IPL and the top run-getter in first-class domestic cricket in the ‘09-10 season, cannot be auctioned and could get a fixed salary not exceeding Rs 10 lakh for those who started playing first-class cricket in 2009-10 !

IPL's exponential growth is due to the millions of cricket-crazy fans of Indian origin who watch the telecast of each and every game. The IPL organising council has to work overtime to ensure that there is no money laundering of any kind by any investor, what with underworld betting syndicates being actively involved in spot-fixing in cricket of the kind that implicated Pakistani cricketers who were reportedly given money just six months ago, during an Oval Test between Pakistan and England.

If the functioning of IPL is to be perceived as completely transparent , there cannot be any conflict of interest of the kind where Chennai Super Kings owner N Srinivasan is also the BCCI secretary and president-elect and a member of the IPL governing council which excludes the other franchise owners.

Finally, taxes should be paid in full by not just individual cricketers but by the world's most affluent cricketing board, the BCCI.