Former India all-rounder Ajit Agarkar has been officially appointed as chairperson of the senior men’s selection committee by the BCCI.
Agarkar, who is in London, was interviewed virtually by the Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC) — consisting of Sulakshana Naik, Ashok Malhotra and Jatin Paranjape — on Tuesday and unanimously recommended to head the panel.
Sources told The Telegraph that Agarkar, 45, was the only candidate interviewed by the CAC. He is the fifth member of the selection committee which already has Shiv Sunder Das, Salil Ankola, Subroto Banerjee and Sridharan Sharath.
The chief selector’s post has been vacant since Chetan Sharma resigned in February following a sting operation by a news channel. Agarkar’s first assignment will be to select the squad for the five T20Is in the West Indies and set in motion a roadmap for the World Cup in 2024.
The selection meeting is scheduled on Wednesday and it remains to be seen if Hardik Pandya is formally named as captain of the T20 squad. It is also expected that the selectors will make it clear whether Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli will have a role to play in the T20 side.
Agarkar, who played 26 Tests, 191 ODIs and four T20Is, is the senior-most member of the panel as per BCCI rules. He was also a member of the Mahendra Singh Dhoni-led squad which won the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007.
The BCCI has struggled to convince any former captain to be the chairman of selectors following the introduction of the conflict of interest clause in its constitution recommended by former Chief Justice RM Lodha.
The new committee will have two selectors from the West Zone while North Zone will go unrepresented. The BCCI has followed an unwritten rule of picking a selector from each of the five zones but the revised constitution doesn’t mention that selectors should be appointed on a zonal basis.
Agarkar is learnt to have been roped in with the promise that the annual remuneration of the chief selector will be substantially increased from Rs 1 crore. The other members earn Rs 90 lakh annually.
Ironically, the BCCI did not pick Agarkar when he had applied for the national selector’s post in 2020. The apex council of the Board will have to clear the hike in selectors’ remuneration.
With the ODI World Cup only three months away, the BCCI was keen to rope in a big name to put aside any uncertainty surrounding the selection committee. The age cap of 60 years was relaxed and former captain Dilip Vengsarkar was also contacted.
