By Qaiser Mohammad Ali, IANS
Jaipur : To streamline umpires’ and referees’ postings domestically and cut paperwork, India’s cricket board has launched www.bcciregistration.com though its much-delayed main website is yet to go online.
The tender for the rights of www.bcci.tv, the official website of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), has been floated. Eventually, www.bcciregistration.com will merge with www.bcci.tv when the website rights are allotted next year.
For the time being, the BCCI has started coordinating with umpires, match referees and its affiliated units through the partial website by giving a unique password to them.
“Basically, we wanted to start this project (website). The idea is to reduce paperwork. www.bcciregistration.com will merge with www.bcci.tv when it goes online next year,” Ratnakar Shetty, BCCI’s chief administrative officer, told IANS over telephone from Mumbai.
The International Cricket Council has been asking the BCCI for a few years to do away with paperwork and correspond only through email to save time and energy.
Finally, the BCCI has started listening to the ICC.
“This year we have kept both options open – paper and online — for the BCCI associations to register their players with the board. From next year, all work will be done only online,” Shetty said.
He disclosed that the BCCI was also in the process of printing booklets on all its 30 affiliated associations.
“The booklet will have all the relevant information about the associations, like when they were formed and on which grounds they play matches. This information will also be put up in the associations’ section on www.bcciregistration.com,” he said.
The booklet will also be distributed to the media besides others.
The partial website, for now, has sections for umpires, associations and referees.
Besides posting the information on the website, the board is informing umpires and referees of their match postings through email and SMS messages, said Shetty.
“Umpires and referees can access their postings for all domestic tournaments this season, both seniors and juniors, through this website,” he said.
Asked when the main website would be launched, he said: “Can’t say when it would become functional as it is a mater with the board’s marketing committee.”
BCCI, the world’s richest cricket board and worth $9.6 billion, is the only one of the 10 Test-playing countries that does not have a proper website, while many tiny cricket-playing nations have fully functional websites.
Successive BCCI regimes never paid any attention to this basic need for its many stakeholders, making itself the laughing stock in the cricketing world.