Playing games with World Cup venues
Azad Majumder
The National Sports Council has relaxed conditions in putting out to tender the installation of electronic scoreboards in five World Cup venues while the Bangladesh Cricket Board has expressed its concerns about the matter as some criteria laid out by the International Cricket Council have not been adhered to.
The board has sent a letter to the state minister for sports, who is chairman of the sports council, passing the responsibility for any consequence out of the matter on to the National Sports Council.
The sports council earlier in October floated tenders for the installation of electronic scoreboards for five venues to be used in World Cup 2011 in line with the guideline of the International Cricket Council.
The ICC venue inspection team in its report in October said the cricket board must ensure that the specifications and management or maintenance of playing facilities such as floodlights, video display and scoring system are of suitable standards.
The report further said the scoreboard must be able to display all required information and the software to be used should be provided by an organisation that understands the requirement.
The comments in the report have made it mandatory that the ICC standards need to be closely matched or the game’s global body is free to reschedule the matches to some other stadiums, cricket board officials said.
The cricket board accordingly appointed a consultant who drew detailed specifications based on information on performance and experience from various events received from various sources.
The sports council floated the tenders which were scheduled to be closed on November 9. But the sports council later deferred the tenders twice and finally opened the bids on December 15.
The technical specifications and qualification criteria have meanwhile been relaxed, allegedly to favour a vested group, cricket board officials said. The original tender documents said that the software proposed must have been in use in previous ICC events and the manufacturer would need to provide a declaration to this effect.
But the sports council later amended the provision and said the manufacturer, installer or supplier must provide declaration to this effect. Cricket board officials said it was done to give the work, worth not less than Tk 35 core, to people who are unable to get such declaration from any easily accessible installers and suppliers but the manufacturers.
The cricket board in a letter sent to the sports minister on November 25 said it would not take any responsibility in this regard.
‘The BCB believes that the NSC has the sole responsibility for modernisation, development and renovation of the Word Cup venues in keeping with the ICC guidelines,’ the letter said.
The BCB president, AHM Mustafa Kamal, signed the letter addressed to the state minister for youth and sports, Ahad Ali Sarkar.
Asked why the NSC has relaxed the specifications and qualification criteria, its director (planning and development) Abdur Rahman said it was done to allow maximum number bidders to take part in the process.
‘We wanted to give all interested groups a chance to participate in the tender process,’ Abdur Rahman said in his office on Wednesday.
‘We did not want to limit it to a certain group. Before issuing a corrigendum to the tender notice, we also took the opinion of the Central Procurement and Training Unit of the Planning Commission,’ he said.
The NSC official admitted that they did not take the opinion of the cricket board in this regard.
- New Age
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