BCCI Structure Explained: Who Runs Indian Cricket

The most powerful organisation in cricket is not a government department, not a company listed on any exchange, and not a body that answers to the sport's global governing council in any meaningful way. It is a registered society whose members are state cricket associations, and whose president is elected by those members at an annual general meeting. That is the whole legal skeleton of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. Everything else, including a tournament that reshaped the economics of the sport, hangs off it.

Understanding how this works matters, because almost every argument about Indian cricket, from selection to scheduling to the length of the domestic season, eventually resolves into a question about who holds the votes.

What the BCCI actually is

The board was formed in 1928 to give the country a single body to represent it at international level, replacing an arrangement of provincial and princely patronage that had run tours on an ad hoc basis for decades. The early story of how the game arrived and spread is set out separately in the guide to the origins of cricket in India, and the international record that followed in India's cricket history.

Legally, the BCCI is a society, not a public authority. It receives no government funding for its day-to-day operations. Its income comes from selling the commercial rights to cricket played in the country and from its share of global tournament revenue. It is a full member of the International Cricket Council, which gives it a seat and a vote there, though its influence in that room has never depended much on the vote.

The society's members are the associations that run cricket in the states and territories. They are the electorate. The office bearers are drawn from them, elected by them, and answerable to them. A president who loses the confidence of the state units does not last, and several have discovered this the hard way.

The states and their votes

Around three dozen associations hold full membership under the current constitution. Each full member sends a representative to the general body, and that representative carries the vote.

This sounds tidy. It has never been tidy in practice, because the membership list is a fossil record of how cricket was organised before independence rather than a map of the modern country. Maharashtra has historically had three full members: the Mumbai Cricket Association, the Maharashtra Cricket Association at Pune, and the Vidarbha Cricket Association at Nagpur. Gujarat has had three as well, in Ahmedabad, Rajkot and Baroda. Meanwhile several states had none at all until relatively recently.

Institutional members complicated it further. The Railways, the Services, and university cricket all fielded teams in the national championship and, for most of the board's history, voted alongside the states.

The arithmetic of this is the single most consequential fact in Indian cricket administration. A bloc of associations that vote together decides the presidency, and the presidency shapes selection panels, tour programmes and commercial policy. Reform of Indian cricket has, for the past decade, essentially meant reform of that arithmetic.

The Lodha reforms and what actually changed

In 2013 an investigation into betting and corruption around the Indian Premier League grew into a wider examination of how the board conducted itself. The Supreme Court, having appointed one committee to establish the facts, then appointed another under Justice R M Lodha, a former Chief Justice of India, to recommend structural changes. The Lodha panel reported in 2016 and the court accepted the bulk of what it proposed.

What the panel recommended

The recommendations were sweeping. Among the most significant:

• One state, one vote. The multiple-association states would be rationalised so that each state carried a single vote, with institutional members reduced to associate status without voting rights.
• Term limits and cooling-off. A cap on how long any individual could hold office, in a state association and at the board, with a mandatory break between terms.
• An age ceiling for office bearers.
• Disqualification of ministers and government servants from holding board or state office.
• No holding office in two cricket bodies at once, ending the practice of running a state association and a national committee simultaneously.
• An Apex Council to replace the old working committee, with independent representation on it.
• A players' association, an Ombudsman and an Ethics Officer.
• Separation of the IPL's governance from the board's general administration.

What survived

Some of this was implemented in full. Some was diluted, and the dilution is where the interesting detail lies.

A Committee of Administrators, appointed by the court and chaired by the former Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai, ran the board for roughly two years while a new constitution was drafted and registered. Elected administration resumed at the end of that period.

The cooling-off provision, originally intended to force a break after every term, was softened so that an official could serve consecutive terms before standing down, and the Supreme Court permitted amendments along those lines. The one-state-one-vote principle survived in name but did not strip the historic associations in Maharashtra and Gujarat of their membership. Institutional teams lost their votes but kept playing.

What genuinely changed is worth stating plainly. Ten states and territories that had never had full membership received it, and their teams entered the national first-class championship for the first time, a development covered in the Ranji Trophy guide. The board acquired a written constitution with defined offices and defined limits, replacing a set of conventions. An Ombudsman and an Ethics Officer exist. A nominee of the Comptroller and Auditor General sits on the Apex Council, which is the first time an outside auditor's representative has had a seat in the room.

Reformers argue the dilutions gutted the intent. Administrators argue that a board run by people with no experience of running cricket would have been worse. Both positions have evidence.

The Apex Council and the office bearers

The board's day-to-day direction sits with five office bearers: a President, a Vice-President, a Secretary, a Joint Secretary and a Treasurer. In practice the Secretary's office carries enormous operational weight, because it handles scheduling, correspondence with the ICC and other boards, and the machinery of committees.

Above them sits the Apex Council, the body that replaced the old working committee. It brings together the office bearers with representatives elected by the full members, a representative of the cricketers' association, and the CAG nominee. Its job is oversight rather than execution.

Underneath sit the committees that do the visible work: the senior men's and women's selection committees, the cricket advisory committee that appoints selectors, the technical committee, the finance committee, and the tournament committee that fixes the domestic calendar.

Body	Composition in outline	What it decides
General body	One representative per full member association	Elects office bearers, amends the constitution
Apex Council	Office bearers, member representatives, players' representative, CAG nominee	Oversight of board policy and finances
Office bearers	President, Vice-President, Secretary, Joint Secretary, Treasurer	Day-to-day administration
Selection committees	Former players appointed on fixed terms	National squads, men's and women's
IPL Governing Council	Chairman plus appointed and ex officio members	Running the league within board policy

Where the IPL sits

This is the part most often misunderstood. The Indian Premier League is not a separate company that licenses cricket from the board. It is a tournament owned and operated by the BCCI, run through an IPL Governing Council that reports upward. The franchises are privately owned businesses that hold long-term participation rights, but the competition itself, its rules, its calendar and its central commercial contracts, belongs to the board.

That structure explains a good deal about how the league behaves. Player availability for the national side always outranks franchise convenience. Indian players are not permitted to enter overseas leagues while under central or state contract, which is why you will not find them in the Big Bash League or the county game. The auction mechanism, the salary cap and the retention rules are set centrally rather than negotiated club by club, and how that machinery works is explained in how the IPL auction works.

The Lodha panel wanted the league's governance walled off from the board's, precisely to avoid the conflicts that surfaced in 2013. The current arrangement is a compromise: a distinct council with its own chairman, but not a distinct legal entity.

Our own ball-by-ball dataset covers well over a thousand IPL matches across every season the league has been played, and the franchise pages carry the full computed records: Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings with five titles each, Kolkata Knight Riders with three, and the newer sides including Gujarat Titans, who in our figures hold the highest win percentage of any franchise, on a much smaller sample.

The women's game inside the structure

Women's cricket in India was administered by a separate body until 2006, when the Women's Cricket Association of India was merged into the BCCI. That merger put the women's national side, the domestic women's competitions and the age-group structure under the same roof as the men's game, with the same selection machinery and the same funding source.

The most visible consequence arrived much later, with the launch of a franchise league for women run on the same model as the men's competition. That is covered in full in the Women's Premier League guide.

The board's financial weight

The BCCI is the wealthiest cricket board by a distance that is not close. Two things produce that.

The domestic market

India supplies the overwhelming majority of the sport's television audience and the overwhelming majority of its sponsorship value. Rights to cricket played in the country, international and franchise, are the single largest commercial asset in the game.

The global revenue share

The ICC distributes its surplus among members according to a model the members themselves approve, and the model in force for the current cycle allocates India the largest single share, a figure reported to be close to two-fifths of the distributable amount. The justification offered is contribution: the argument that most of the revenue being distributed was generated by Indian viewership in the first place. The counter-argument, made by smaller boards, is that a distribution model weighted this heavily entrenches the imbalance it describes.

Either way, the practical effect is that the board can fund a domestic first-class competition across three dozen teams, pay match fees to players who will never approach the national side, and absorb the cost of hosting tournaments in a way no other member can. It also means that the international calendar is shaped substantially by what suits the Indian schedule, a dynamic visible in how series against Australia and England are now structured and one that shows up even in discussions about the Ashes window.

Where governance still gets argued about

Three fault lines recur.

The domestic calendar

Fitting a first-class season, two limited-overs national competitions, age-group cricket and a two-month franchise window into one year means something gets compressed. Red-ball cricket usually loses.

Conflict of interest

The reforms tightened the definition considerably, which had the side effect of making it difficult for former players to hold coaching, commentary and committee roles simultaneously. Several prominent figures have had to choose. Whether the rule is calibrated correctly is a live disagreement.

State association standards

The board's constitution requires member associations to adopt matching constitutions of their own. Compliance has been uneven, and the gap between the best-run associations and the weakest is wide. A player's experience of facilities, payment and selection can vary considerably depending on which state he or she is registered with.

If you want the sporting output of all this rather than the administration, the guide to the spin bowling tradition covers what the system has historically produced, and the player index carries career records. The rest of the Indian game is collected on the cricket in India hub, and comparable structures elsewhere are set out in cricket around the world.

Sources and method

This guide draws on the BCCI's own published constitution and annual reports, the Supreme Court judgments and the Lodha Committee report that produced the current governance framework, and ICC member and revenue-distribution documentation. Figures relating to the Indian Premier League, including franchise win percentages and match totals, are computed from our own ball-by-ball dataset rather than taken from a third party. Where a number is contested or changes between cycles, it has been described in general terms rather than stated precisely. This site is independent and is not affiliated with the BCCI, the ICC or any league or franchise.