Mumbai Cricket Association Announces ₹500-Crore Fund for Grassroots Cricket

The Mumbai Cricket Association has put a bold number on its vision for the city’s next generation of cricketers: ₹500 crore.

At its annual general meeting at Wankhede Stadium on Friday, the MCA committed to building a ₹500-crore corpus over the next decade, ring-fenced for grassroots cricket in Mumbai — from maidan clubs to school and college teams.

“We decided to allocate a corpus fund of ₹500 crores,” MCA president Ajinkya Naik said after the meeting. “In the last AGM, we contributed ₹100 crores and this time we did increase it to ₹500 crores for our grassroots cricketers, clubs like maidan clubs, school clubs and college clubs.”

The association already has ₹100 crore set aside for the same purpose. Under the new plan, the MCA will add ₹40 crore every year for the next 10 years. The principal will stay untouched as an endowment-style fixed deposit, with only the interest being used to fuel the game at the base of the pyramid.

Naik described it in simple financial terms, but with clear sporting intent. The ₹500-crore fund will sit in a fixed deposit, the interest then distributed among affiliated clubs to meet day-to-day needs: kits, equipment, facilities, logistics. How that money is deployed will rest with the clubs themselves.

“It’s like an endowment fund. You keep this ₹500 crores in a fixed deposit, and from that fixed deposit, the interest gets distributed. That is for providing kits, facilities, etc. So it depends on the clubs and how they want to use it. Sometimes they use it for logistics, sometimes they use it for cricket equipment, so there are different ways,” Naik explained.

While the numbers pointed to the future, the rest of the AGM agenda leaned heavily on history and legacy inside one of cricket’s most iconic venues.

Three lounges at Wankhede will soon carry the names of Sachin Tendulkar, Madhav Mantri and Ajinkya Rahane. A committee has already been formed to identify and finalise the specific spaces that will bear those names, stitching together different eras of Mumbai cricket in the stadium’s fabric.

The association is also moving ahead with plans to install a statue of Dilip Vengsarkar inside the Wankhede complex, another nod to a stalwart who shaped Mumbai’s cricketing identity long before the latest generation arrived.

On the administrative front, the MCA chose to keep its powder dry on one of the biggest governance questions looming over Indian sport — the proposed National Sports Governance Act, 2025, which has drawn fresh scrutiny after a recent Supreme Court poser. Naik made it clear the association will align itself with the national body.

“We have not discussed it. We will go by the BCCI decision,” he said.

For now, Mumbai’s cricket establishment has made its priorities plain: lock in money for the kids on the maidans, honour the giants in marble and metal, and let the battles over governance play out in Delhi and the BCCI rooms.