BCCI should put selection process in place

No talent can be developed without a process in place. Cricket Australia realised this a few months back and appointed Greg Chappell as their talent manager, but the BCCI launched the system of unearthing talent in 2002. It is not that the process that was faulty but the development has faltered repeatedly.
In the East Zone Ranji one-dayers played in Jamshedpur in 2002, one of the batsmen made a mockery of some of the quality bowlers.He apparently bisected the field placements intelligently and hit the cricket ball with tremendous power in the stands with utmost ease.
The tournament was watched by the two Talent Resource Development Officers (TRDOs) PC Podar, a cricketer of 1960s, and the former Bengal captain Raju Mukherjee. Both recommended the player to the then chairman of the TRDO wing, Dilip Vengsarkar. That was how Ranchi boy Mahendra Singh Dhoni was spotted. Within a year, he was knocking on the doors of the national selection committee.
In fact, seven players of the World Cup winning team are products of the TRDO system which unearthed many players who went on to play for India. One of them is Parthiv Patel who played Test cricket before he played for Gujarat.
Before the TRDO system was launched in 2002, the Indian selection process encouraged the zonal selectors to play destructive politics. One player from south zone exploited the system by joining the state teams in other zones that had a representative in the national selection committee, and he managed to play for the country every time he changed the state!
In 1974, three West Zone selectors made sure that India openers Sunil Gavaskar and Ashok Mankad were replaced by Madhu Gupte and Niranjan Mehta in the Duleep Trophy final. A couple of years back, a first-class player from Maharashtra was good enough to be picked for The Challengers by the national selectors but wasn't good enough to be in his state team's list of probables. Ironically, one of the national selectors belonged to the same state.
Until 2006, the chairman of the TRDO wing and chief TRDOs of the zones would apprise the selectors of talent viewed by their teams of TRDOs. This helped the selectors because it was impossible for selectors to watch more than 500 matches.
No longer do the TRDOs attend the selection committee meetings, so the talent identified by the 50-odd TRDO-cummatch referees is not known to selectors. One former member of the junior selection committee said, "TRDOs watch all the matches which we can't. What they watch we don't get to know and what we are looking for they are not aware of. They apparently feed talent data on the NCA website, and we have no access to it."
Today, when N Srinivasan takes over as the president of the BCCI - the best-run sports body in the country - hopefully he will put the selection process in place. There is no paucity of talent in the country. What is urgently needed is for it to be unearthed properly and groomed scientifically.