The Board of Control for Cricket in India will now offer business class seats on domestic flights to only the chief selectors of the senior and junior national teams, according to a report in The Indian Express.
This means, only Sunil Joshi and Ashish Kapoor – the chairmen of the senior and junior selection committees respectively – will get to fly business class on BCCI-sponsored trips, while the rest of their colleagues will be offered economy class seats.
Joshi, Sarandeep Singh, Harvinder Singh, Devang Gandhi and Jatin Paranjpe form the men’s senior selection committee, while Kapoor, Debashish Mohanty, Amit Sharma, Gyanendra Pandey and Rakesh Parikh are the current junior selectors.
This decision by the BCCI, though, is only for flights that have a travel time of up to seven hours. For a flight of a longer duration, for instance an overseas trip, business class seats will be offered to all the selectors.
Up until 2013, all the selectors would travel economy class. The BCCI decided to change that after some selectors complained of feeling inferior seeing players on the same flight sitting in business class seats.
However, the BCCI president Sourav Ganguly and secretary Jay Shah now believe that the board will end up saving a lot of money by reducing the number of business class seats on domestic flights. Even BCCI general managers will have to fly economy class within India from now on.
As far as the women’s selection committee is concerned, the Indian cricket board is yet to appoint a new one after the previous one’s tenure ended recently.
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