IPL Green Light Depends on Government Decisions, Public Health Most Important: Kiren Rijiju

India’s sports minister Kiren Rijiju on Sunday made it clear that any decision along the lines of allowing the currently suspended-IPL to commence would have to be taken by the government and not the BCCI, depending on the situation in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic.

Talking about IPL 2020 which is currently suspended indefinitely, Sports Minister Rijiju said that it is up to the government to take a call about hosting any tournament in the country.

“In India the government has to take a call and it will be depending on the situation of the pandemic, how we progress as a nation,” Rijiju told India Today.

“We can’t put health of the nation at risk just because we want sporting events to be held. Our focus is fighting COVID-19 and at the same time we will have to work a mechanism to get back to normalcy. It is difficult to confirm dates but I am sure we will have some kind of sporting events this year.”

“We have been working for quite some time now to resume sporting activities but before that we have to think about practice and training. We are not going to have a tournament kind of situation immediately,” Rijiju explained.

The BCCI, the richest cricket body in the world, had said it would consider staging the cash-rich IPL in October-November if the T20 World Cup, which is scheduled to take place in Australia gets postponed.

The IPL is worth almost $530 million to the BCCI and attracts the best international and Indian cricketers. It was scheduled to start at the end of March but was indefinitely postponed because of the pandemic.

India has reported 131,868 infections from the new coronavirus, with 3,867 deaths.