BCCI’s New Approach to Combat Age Fraud in Cricket

Age fraud is one of the most critical problems in Indian cricket. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is actively fighting this issue, which is detrimental to the development of young players. In recent days, officials have taken a major new step to make the age verification process of cricketers as transparent and efficient as possible.

What happened

The BCCI has officially started looking for a third-party agency to handle the verification of the credentials of players, reporters have learned. It has recently started collecting proposals and is expected to make a choice by the end of August. Apparently, officials see verification of credentials/certificates as one of the weaknesses in the fight against age fraud. Bringing an outside agency into the process should supposedly make it more efficient and eventually eliminate players who are underage from entering the system.

The inspection period will be extended

India currently uses a two-tiered system of age verification for boys under 16 and girls under 15. First, officials verify documents and birth certificates. The second verification is the TW3 (Tanner-Whitehouse 3) method, which boils down to a bone test. It is reported that the third-party agency to be selected by the Board must have at least three years of experience in background verification services for reputed firms.

Every year, BCCI conducts age verification in each state in July and August. But this time, it is expected that verification may be extended to September because the agency will not begin work until the end of August at the earliest.