Despite COA capping budget for opening ceremony at Rs 18 cr, about Rs 23 cr poured into it
The Indian cricket board has overshot the budget allocated to it for conducting the opening ceremony of the 11th edition of the Indian Premier League, which is going on.
When Justice Lodha led Committee’s recommendations were accepted by the Supreme Court in July 2016, it was a foregone conclusion that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will be transparent and engage a senior Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) official to oversee its business part.
As the 2017 Indian Premier League (IPL) was conducted in a hurry as confusion prevailed after SC verdict, it was also expected that the 2018 edition will showcase accountability under the supervision of Committee of Administrators (COA).
However a look at the BCCI website, which details payments made to an event management company to conduct the IPL 2018 season “opening ceremony” clearly show how they have overshot the budget by about Rs 5 crore, spending total of about Rs 23 crore as against Rs 18 crore capped by COA chief Vinod Rai.
DNA has learnt that it all started with as many as six top event management companies showing interest after going through IPL’s Request of Proposal (RFP) to conduct the opening ceremony. As the bidding started, three out of six companies were short-listed and rated as per their initial proposals.
The top bidder (L1) happened to be ‘Showtime’, which quoted a price of Rs 15.75 crore. The second top bidder (L2) was ‘Fountainhead’ at Rs 16.90 crore while the third bidder was Wizcraft Entertainment with a quote of Rs 17.80 crore.
It was when the final bids were invited on March 28 from all three companies along with the list of stars that top two bidders — Showtime and Fountainhead — decided to withdraw from the race citing “budgetary restrictions” or “lack of time to prepare”.
That left Wizcraft the lone bidder for the job and BCCI chief operating officer (COO) Hemang Amin informed all the officials that a deal has further been negotiated to Rs 16.25 crore from the earlier quoted one and popular actor Ranveer Singh would perform in the opening ceremony.
However, Ranveer suffered an injury and was replaced by Hrithik Roshan and it was informed that he will cost Rs 1.45 crore more to the event company.
As per the BCCI website, a total payment to Wizcraft will be more than Rs 20 crore. And if the payments are made after the statutory TDS deduction and 18 per cent of GST to be calculated (including TDS deduction), the total deal will be around Rs 23 crore.
Why delay?
The question now everyone is asking that who ordered the increase in budget after the exit of top two bidders?
Perhaps, the increase in price is as per RFP. Possibly, all the approvals are in place from the COA and from the CEO (Rahul Johri) or from the acting secretary (Amitabh Choudhary) as well as the chairman of the IPL (Rajeev Shukla). But the question is whether right process was followed in finsalising the bidder?”
A senior official of the Showtime said, “The COA has now been there for more than a year. Why was so much time taken (till March 28) to finalise the vendors and opening ceremony related issue, when the same was finalised by February earlier (during IPL 2017)?”
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