India's cricket board once paid the state broadcaster to show its matches
Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the Board of Control for Cricket in India handed Doordarshan 5 lakh rupees a match just to put the national team on television. A 1995 Supreme Court ruling flipped that arrangement, and the board became the richest governing body in the sport.
The turnaround started with satellite television. In 1993 the board struck a deal with TransWorld International to televise England's tour, leaving Doordarshan to buy the domestic rights from TWI, and the Hero Cup that year aired on Star TV, ending the state channel's monopoly. A long legal fight followed, led on the board's side by Jagmohan Dalmiya and president I. S. Bindra. In February 1995 the Supreme Court declared that broadcast rights to India's matches were a commodity owned by the board, so broadcasters must pay it. Two years earlier, after the board backed South Africa's return to world cricket, the South African broadcaster had become the first to buy rights to a tour of India.
Its roots are modest. Europeans played cricket along India's coasts in the early 1700s, the first recorded match came in 1751, and the Calcutta Cricket Club, founded in 1792, is the second-oldest club in the world. The Parsis were the first Indian civilian community to take up the game. The board itself formed in December 1928 in Madras after the England captain Arthur Gilligan promised to lobby for Indian membership of the imperial cricket body if local promoters united. India played its first Test at Lord's in 1932 under C. K. Nayudu, and in 1975 a Test player earned 2,500 rupees per match.
Money arrived in floods with the Indian Premier League, launched in 2007. In 2008 the board auctioned eight city franchises for about 723 million dollars and sold ten years of global media rights for 1.03 billion, a deal renegotiated a year later to 1.6 billion. Imitation leagues soon sprang up worldwide. When a rival Indian Cricket League appeared, the board banned players who joined it, later pardoning them once they quit.
In 2023–24 it earned about 18,700 crore rupees, and it remains a private, autonomous body taking no grants from the sports ministry.
Source: Board of Control for Cricket in India
