Jagmohan Dalmiya
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Jagmohan Dalmiya was born in Calcutta, India on May 30, 1940, is a well-known Indian cricket administrator. He studied at the Scottish Church College, Calcutta.
He started his career as a wicketkeeper, playing for cricket clubs (including his college team) in Calcutta and had once made a double-century. He joined his father's firm ML Dalmiya and Co. and made it into one of India's top construction firms. His firm constructed Calcutta's M.P.Birla Planetarium in 1963. He got married to a Bengali lady. Dalmiya’s wife is a daughter of the Ghosh family of Pathuriaghat. [citation needed]He has a daughter and a son.
He joined the BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) in 1979, and became its treasurer in 1983 (the year India won the Cricket World Cup) and later, along with Inderjit Singh Bindra helped to win the right to stage the World Cup in South Asia in 1987 and 1996. He has been the President of BCCI on numerous occasions. Though initially rejected by white cricket playing nations, despite his winning the ICC Presidential elections by a 25-13 margin in 1996, he was unanimously elected as the chairman of the ICC International Cricket Council only a year later in 1997 for a period of three years, a period in which his work greatly helped to enhance the fortunes of ICC.
In 1996, the BBC declared him to be one of the world's top six sports executives. When Australia and West Indies refused to play in terror-scarred Sri Lanka during the 1996 World Cup, he conjured up a united India-Pakistan team in a matter of days to play friendlies against Sri Lanka there. In 1991, when the boycott of South Africa officially ended, he arranged a tour of the South African cricket team in India that went a long way in helping them shed the stigma of apartheid.
In 2005 he has been presented with the International Journal of the History of Sports Achievement award for administrative excellence in global sport.
In the 2005 BCCI board elections, he was ousted by Indian government minister Sharad Pawar as the head cricket official of India.
In the words of the Australian cricketer Ian Chappell: "He has a vision for the game’s progress that I haven’t heard enunciated by any other so-called leader among cricket officials."
