Following its call for nominations to the USA Cricket Board, the independent Nominating & Governance Committee (composed of Jagan Jagannathan, Amy Perko, Jim Isch and Nisarg Patel) announced that it has completed its screening process and review of all applicants.
There was considerable interest in these positions, particularly for the Individual Director role, and that the constitution requires that no more than five candidates be put forward for each position. As such, the NGC sought and followed independent legal advice on how best to exercise its duty to determine which five applicants to put forward.
Part of that process involved a review against an agreed set of objective criteria designed to help identify those most likely to be able to assist the existing USA Cricket Board and support USA Cricket with its objectives, and steps were taken to assess compliance with the eligibility requirements set out in the constitution.
Following the conclusion of that work, on April 15th, the NGC agreed on a list of candidates who were all eligible to be put forward as part of this election.* The candidates were then offered an opportunity to withdraw from the process before the NGC made its announcement. The NGC then met again April 28th, and has now finally determined that the following applicants should be put forward as candidates for the upcoming election:
Individual Director Candidates
• Anand Patel
• Babu Venkatachalapathy
• Ganesh Sanap
• Kuljit-Singh Nijjar
• Suraj Viswanathan
Club Director Candidates
• Ajith Bhaskar
• Atul Rai
• Nikhil Deshpande
• Susheel Bhat
Female Player Director Candidates
• Nadia Gruny
All of the applicants who were not put forward have now been notified and the NGC wishes to thank everybody for their interest in being involved.
The NGC expressed its frustration about the delay to this election and its inability to be able to finalize and announce a timeline. The NGC was advised that the final steps needed to produce an eligible list of voters for it to consider and publish for peer review had recently been delayed further because of the impact of COVID on the technology support team based in India. This follows previous delays caused by the Board’s earlier direction to extend the registration deadline, and the deployment of organizational resources to address the ongoing lawsuit. However, the NGC hopes to be able to announce a final timeline shortly.
*NOTE ON ELIGIBILITY: The NGC has carried out this work on the basis that the upcoming election will go ahead as directed by the USA Cricket Board, but acknowledges that there is an ongoing lawsuit that seeks to challenge that direction. The NGC notes that if that lawsuit is successful, this may impact upon whether all the above candidates remain eligible to stand or not and it reserves the right to make necessary changes where required.
