Why BCCI, the world’s richest cricket board, stays exempt from RTI Act

How BCCI represents India?

The applicant had asked the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sport a set of plain questions. Under what authority does the BCCI represent India? Do players selected by it play for the country or for the BCCI? Why do governments lend stadiums and police cover to a private association? Does the Union government have any legal control over the Board?

The ministry replied that the information was not with it and that the BCCI had not been declared a public authority. The RTI application, therefore, could not be transferred.

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This was not the first such question. In 2018, then Information Commissioner Madabhushi Sridhar Acharyulu had held that the BCCI should be treated as a public authority. He directed the Board to appoint Central Public Information Officers and to make proactive disclosures under Section 4 of the Act, which requires public authorities to publish key categories of information without waiting for a request. The BCCI moved the Madras High Court.

In September 2025, the High Court remanded the matter to the Commission, asking it to apply the guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court in BCCI V Cricket Association of Bihar. The new order is the product of that remand.

Its reasoning is textual. Section 2(h) of the RTI Act defines a public authority as a body established by the Constitution, by a Parliamentary or State statute, or by a government notification, and includes any body owned, controlled or substantially financed by the government. Ramesh held the definition to be exhaustive.

Public importance is not enough. A body may discharge functions of immense public consequence, but unless it satisfies one of the statutory tests, the Act does not reach it. Applied to the BCCI, the test yielded a familiar answer.

BCCI not a state

The Board is a society registered under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act, 1975. It was not created by Parliament, by a state legislature or by a government notification.

Registration under a statute, as the Supreme Court explained in Dalco Engineering v Satish Prabhakar Padhye, is not establishment. Ownership and control were rejected on the strength of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Thalappalam Service Co-operative Bank Ltd v State of Kerala, (2010) which holds that the “control” contemplated by the Act must be substantial, not regulatory.

The Supreme Court has held that the BCCI is not a “State”, under Article 12 of the Constitution but is amenable to writ jurisdiction under Article 226, the provision that allows High Courts to review the actions of bodies discharging public functions.

That was settled in Zee Telefilms Ltd v Union of India (2005) and reaffirmed in BCCI v Cricket Association of Bihar (2016). The Commission has now drawn a sharp line between those rulings and the RTI question. A body can be subject to public-law review without being subject to citizen-led information requests, the CIC says.

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The distinction is the source of the transparency problem. Judicial review under Article 226 is episodic, expensive and adversarial. A player, a state-association member, a journalist, a parent of a junior cricketer cannot always afford to draft a writ petition. RTI is routine, low-cost and preventive. It allows the citizen to seek records before a dispute hardens into litigation.

The order preserves a remedy in theory and withdraws a tool in practice.

The irony

The 275th Report of the Law Commission of India (April 2018) had taken a far more expansive view. The Report described the BCCI as exercising “State-like” powers, called its functions public in character and recommended that the Board be treated as a public authority under the RTI Act. It went further and recommended that the BCCI be viewed as an instrumentality of State under Article 12, which would have opened it to writ jurisdiction in the Supreme Court itself under Article 32.

The Commission’s present answer is that recommendations are recommendations. The Lodha Committee reforms restructured the BCCI’s governance, and the Law Commission urged legislative intervention, but neither amounts to a statutory declaration under Section 2(h).

Parliament has since spoken. The National Sports Governance Act, 2025 recognises in its preamble that sports bodies discharge important public functions and must act in an open, fair and accountable manner. But its RTI provision is narrow. Recognised sports organisations that receive government grants or financial assistance are deemed public authorities, and even then only to the extent of those funds.

The CIC has now found that the BCCI receives no such assistance. The Act, therefore, does not reach it either.

The result is an irony. A smaller, grant-dependent sports federation may become answerable under the RTI Act for the use of its grant. The richest cricket board in the world, precisely because it is commercially self-financing, stays out. The transparency regime catches the financially weak and misses the institution of greatest public influence.

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The order records the BCCI’s submission that it voluntarily publishes its constitution, policies, membership details, Apex Council minutes, payment particulars and annual reports. Some of this is on the Board’s website. But voluntary disclosure is not the same as a legal right to information. It lets the institution decide what to publish, when, and how much.

RTI shifts that initiative to the citizen.

Narrowing public-law debate

This is where the order travels beyond adjudication. In a section labelled obiter dicta — observations made in passing that do not form part of the binding decision — the Commission spends several paragraphs explaining that increased governmental supervision will not, by itself, secure proper functioning, and that the BCCI has evolved into the financial centre of global cricket through media rights, sponsorships and the Indian Premier League.

To impose a government-control model, it warns, may disrupt a “finely balanced economic structure”. The reasoning may be sound as economics. As reasoning from a body whose job is to decide a narrow statutory question, it reads as an endorsement of the Board’s commercial model. The applicant did not ask the Commission whether the BCCI should be commercially autonomous.

She asked whether her questions could be answered. The obiter answers the question she did not ask, and answers it sympathetically to the Board.

The obiter also rests on a conflation. RTI is not the same as government control. Transparency is not bureaucratic takeover.

A tailored disclosure regime can protect commercially sensitive negotiations while requiring openness on governance, conflicts of interest, selection criteria, disciplinary processes, use of public facilities, player welfare, anti-corruption mechanisms and the functioning of state associations. The choice is not between a free-market BCCI and a nationalised one.

The Commission, by treating it as such, has narrowed a public-law debate it was not asked to settle.

Unfinished question

On the strict statutory question, the order is on safer ground.

The Supreme Court’s judgment in Thalappalam Service Cooperative Bank Ltd vs State of Kerala (2013) places the burden on the applicant to show that a body is owned, controlled or substantially financed. The appellant, Gita Rani, did not appear at the hearing. No material was placed on record to establish substantial financing.

As the Supreme Court has held in Khanapuram Gandaiah v Administrative Officer (2010), the right under the Act extends to information that exists and is held by the public authority. The ministry had said the information was not with it. On that record, the appeal had to fail.

The CIC’s holding may be correct within the architecture of Section 2(h). It leaves Parliament with an unfinished question.

Indian cricket cannot be purely private when it wears the country’s colours, selects the country’s players and occupies the country’s public imagination. The order says public function alone is not enough for RTI. The democratic question is whether it should be.

That question is for the legislature, not for an Information Commission whose proper task is to apply the statute it has.