New Delhi:
Former India captain Shantha Rangaswamy has stepped down from her position as a member of the Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC) and director of the Indian Cricketers Association (ICA) after being served a Conflict of Interest notice by BCCI Ethics Officer DK Jain. "I have other plans so have decided to move on. The CAC was anyway meeting once in a year or one in two years so I did not understand the conflict," Rangaswamy told PTI. "It was an honour to be on the CAC committee. It will be tough to find suitable former cricketers for any administrative role in the current scenario (conflict of interest). The ICA I would have resigned anyway before the elections were held. So it was a matter of time," she added.
Rangaswamy, who was a member of the CAC along with Kapil Dev and Anshuman Gaekwad, sent her resignation letter to the Committee of Administrators (CoA) and the Board's CEO, Rahul Johri via email in the early hours on Sunday. The BCCI Ethics Officer D K Jain on Saturday had sent a notice to CAC, asking the former cricketers who picked the current India coach to respond by October 10 to the Conflict of Interest allegations levelled against them.
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MPCA life member Sanjiv Gupta had filed the complaint against the trio who picked Ravi Shastri as the head coach in August. As per the BCCI constitution, no individual can hold more than one post at the same time. In the complaint, Gupta has claimed that the CAC members don multiple cricketing roles. He wrote that 1983 World Cup winning captain Kapil is conflicted as he is a commentator, owner of a floodlight company, member of Indian Cricketers Association, besides his CAC role.
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Likewise, Gupta alleged that Gaekwad too is conflicted as he owns an academy and is a member of BCCI Affiliation Committee. Rangaswamy is alleged to be conflicted because of her multiple role with the CAC and ICA. The CAC had also picked the women's head coach W V Raman in December but at that time it was an ad-hoc committee. Shastri was a re-appointed for a two-year period, ending with the 2021 T20 World Cup in India. This is Shastri's fourth stint with the national team, having served briefly as the Cricket Manager (2007 tour of Bangladesh), Team Director (2014-2016) and head coach (2017-2019).
