Law soon to fix sports bosses' tenure

The allegations of corruption that plagued the Commonwealth Games have had a fallout: the government will bring in a law stipulating the maximum number of terms, the age limit and other criteria for holding positions in national sports federations. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Feb 20, 2011, 24:33:10 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The allegations of corruption that plagued the Commonwealth Games (CWG) have had a fallout: the government will bring in a law stipulating the maximum number of terms, the age limit and other criteria for holding positions in national sports federations.

This will end the stranglehold several senior politicians have on various sports bodies.

The sports ministry, now headed by Ajay Maken in place of MS Gill, on Friday approved a draft Bill stipulating a maximum term of 12 years for presidents and eight years for all other office-bearers of national sports federations.

The Bill allows these office-bearers to rejoin the federations only after a cooling-off period of four years after the end of their terms but only if they are less than 70 years old.

"It is in accordance with the charter of the International Olympic Committee," a senior ministry official said, adding: "We expect to introduce the Bill in the second half of the budget session."

Several attempts to rein in sports federations since Uma Bharti's stint as sports minister during the NDA regime have failed because of the political clout the associations exerted.

But the government believes that this is the best time to pass the law as several top sports administrators are embroiled in the CWG and other scams.

To prevent any conflict of interest, the draft law also proposes that any person who has been a sports minister cannot join a sports federation for a period of five years after relinquishing his/her ministerial office.

Further, no government official will be allowed to join any sports federation without written permission from his or her cadre controlling authority.

VK Verma was a bureaucrat when he joined the Indian Badminton Association, which he has been heading for the last 13 years.

The new law also prescribes elections through secret ballot, instead of the prevailing practice of voice votes in order to ensure transparency and aims to involve more athletes in the running of sports bodies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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