The Supreme Court wrote the BCCI’s rulebook, and now it is asking why a newer one does not apply
A three-judge bench put one question to the BCCI and every state association this week: why should the National Sports Governance Act not govern your office bearers? The lawyers have gone away to find an answer.
Sep 10, 2026
On Tuesday 8 September a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court asked the BCCI and every state cricket association a question none of them had been asked in quite that form before. Why should the terms and conditions of service of your office bearers not be governed by the National Sports Governance Act, 2025, which is already in force?
Nobody answered. Counsel for the board and the associations were told to go and take instructions from their clients and come back. No order was passed, and the matter is still pending. But the question itself is the news, because of who is asking it.
The court that wrote the current rulebook
Chief Justice Surya Kant sat with Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V Mohana. The case in front of them has been running since 2014, when a dispute involving the Cricket Association of Bihar reached the Supreme Court and never really left.
Out of that came the committee headed by former Chief Justice R.M. Lodha, appointed on 22 January 2015 alongside retired judges Ashok Bhan and R.V. Raveendran. Their recommendations landed on 4 January 2016 and were sweeping: tenure caps, cooling-off periods, one state one vote, a three-man selection panel instead of five. The Supreme Court passed its final order on those reforms on 18 July 2016.
The board fought a long rearguard action, and in September 2022 the court softened what it had imposed. The BCCI constitution as it now stands lets an office bearer serve two consecutive terms in a post and up to 12 continuous years in administration, six at state level and six at the board, before a three-year cooling-off period kicks in.
So the rules the BCCI runs on today were not written by the BCCI. They came from a Supreme Court process, and the same court has now pointed at a different rulebook and asked why that one does not apply instead.
What the 2025 Act would change
Parliament passed the National Sports Governance Act in August 2025, the Lok Sabha on the 11th and the Rajya Sabha the following day. It received presidential assent on 18 August 2025 and came partly into force on 1 January 2026.
Its requirements for national federations do not line up neatly with what the BCCI does now. An executive committee is capped at 15 members. Everyone on it has to be between 25 and 70 years old. At least two places go to sportspersons of outstanding merit, two more to members of the athletes committee, and at least four seats have to be held by women. Terms are limited to three consecutive spells with a mandatory cooling-off, subject to whatever the relevant international federation’s own age and tenure rules say.
The Act also sets up a National Sports Tribunal, chaired by a sitting or former Supreme Court judge or a High Court Chief Justice with two eminent members alongside, to hear sports disputes other than doping cases and international-event matters.
Put the two side by side and the conflict is easy to see. Twelve continuous years under the BCCI constitution against three consecutive terms with a cooling-off under the Act. A four-women floor and reserved athlete seats that the board’s own constitution does not mandate. An outside tribunal for disputes the board currently handles internally.
Why cricket is in this conversation at all
Cricket had spent decades outside the Indian sports-federation system, and the board liked it that way. Two things changed. The sport is going to the Olympics: a six-team T20 tournament for men and another for women at Los Angeles 2028, 28 matches at a temporary ground at the Pomona Fairgrounds, the women starting on 12 July that year and the men on 22 July. An Olympic sport with a national governing body is precisely what a law about national sports federations is written for.
The second thing is a carve-out. When the bill was amended before passage, the transparency provisions were narrowed so that only bodies taking government grants are deemed public authorities under the Right to Information Act. The BCCI takes none, so it stayed outside RTI. Indian press coverage at the time read that as the board getting its way, and it removed a fight that might have held the legislation up.
What that carve-out did not settle is everything else in the Act. Being exempt from one section is not the same as being exempt from the statute, and the bench on Tuesday was asking about a different section entirely: who may hold office, for how long, and on what terms.
What happens next
Very little, immediately. The lawyers take instructions, the applications come back before the bench, and a date gets fixed. The BCCI has been in and out of this courtroom for twelve years and has generally emerged with something less painful than what was first proposed.
The difference this time is that the court is not being asked to invent a standard. Parliament has already written one, and it applies to every other national federation in the country. Explaining why the richest board in world cricket should sit outside it is a harder brief than arguing about a cooling-off period, and that brief is now due.