The Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) has committed Rs 500 crore for the development of grassroots cricket in Mumbai. At its annual general meeting (AGM), held at the Wankhede on Friday (September 11), the MCA said it will create the corpus over the next 10 years for the development of grassroots cricket, including school and college cricket, in the city.
“For grassroots cricket, we decided to allocate a corpus fund of Rs 500 crores. In the last AGM, we contributed Rs 100 crores and this time we did increase it to Rs 500 crores for our grassroots cricketers, clubs like maidan clubs, school clubs and college clubs,” MCA president Ajinkya Naik said after the general body meeting.
There is already a corpus of Rs 100 crore for the purpose. The association will contribute Rs 40 crore each year over the next 10 years to the fund, with the interest generated from it being used for the development of the game at the grassroots level. The amount will be distributed among the affiliated clubs.
“It’s like an endowment fund. You keep this Rs 500 crores in a fixed deposit, and from that fixed deposit, the interest gets distributed. That is for providing kits, facilities, etc. So it depends on the clubs and how they want to use it. Sometimes they use it for logistics, sometimes they use it for cricket equipment, so there are different ways,” Naik said.
In another important decision, the association has decided to name three lounges at the Wankhede after Sachin Tendulkar, Madhav Mantri and Ajinkya Rahane. A committee has been formed to decide on the dedicated spaces for the three lounges. The association is also in the process of installing a statue of Dilip Vengsarkar inside the Wankhede complex.
As for the National Sports Governance Act, 2025, which has become a topic of discussion among cricket administrators following the Supreme Court’s recent poser, the MCA said it will abide by the BCCI’s position. “We have not discussed it. We will go by the BCCI decision,” Naik said.
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