Mumbai, 5/3: Fixing is the “proverbial tip of the huge iceberg of corruption” in cricket and a major revamp of the Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) in the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to check illegal practices is the need of the hour, writes retired IPS officer and the Unit’s former head Neeraj Kumar.
A 1976-batch Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, Kumar, who retired as Delhi Police commissioner in 2013, made the observations and suggestions in his 216-page book A Cop in Cricket, summing up his three years association with the national governing body of cricket in India from 2015 to 2018.
Kumar, who was called by the Metropolitan Police of London to give his advice on the security for Olympics 2012 after the British authorities were happy about his arrangement of Commonwealth Games 2010, feels that cricket is not just a game in India.
“It is also an industry with many spin-off vocations. But not all of these vocations are clean, with fixers and charlatans getting into the mix in a major way to bring a bad name to the game,” he says. In his book, Kumar writes that during the three years he spent at the BCCI he realized that fixing was “the proverbial tip of the huge iceberg of corruption in cricket. Fixing is, in fact, a minuscule percentage of the large-scale chicanery that cricket administrators indulge in.