The project to institute five zonal academies which will serve as feeder lines to the National Cricket Academy in Bangalore gets underway next month. Meeting in Pune on Tuesday, the NCA committee finalised the list of coaching staff for each of the academies which will be patterned closely on the main body. Speaking to reporters, former Board president and chairman of the NCA Committee Raj Singh Dungarpur said that the five academies at Mumbai (West), Delhi (North), Kanpur (Central), Kolkata (East) and Chennai (South) will begin their sessions from April 20 and carry on till the first week of July.

The NCA appeared to run into rough weather last December with the resignations of three major protagonists in the Academy's development: director Hanumant Singh, coach Vasu Paranjpe and committee member Sunil Gavaskar. The mini-crisis raised serious doubts about the Academy's functioning but the caravan is back on the rails, albeit under a new dispensation.

The committee abolished the post of director held by Hanumant Singh in the inaugural session of the NCA. Hanumant who resigned on personal grounds has now been accommodated as a committee member himself along with Sunil Gavaskar, Polly Umrigar and S Venkataraghvan. Gavaskar resigned from the committee after an escalating war of words with Dungarpur but his resignation was turned down. He and Dungarpur later buried their differences in a surprising volte-face.

Instead of a director, the Academy will be headed by a 'chief coach' in former India swing bowler and former Mumbai coach Balwinder Sandhu. "If you are good in any capacity nothing can stop you from going up and hard work always pays. I sincerely think the setting up of NCA is the best thing that has happened to Indian cricket in recent past" Sandhu told PTI after his appointment was confirmed. The list of chief coaches for the five regional academies is as follows: Nari Contractor (West Zone), Arun Lal (East), Kailash Gattani (Central), Daljeet Singh (North) and Kris Srikkanth (South).

Three assistant coaches have also been appointed for each zonal academy: Lalchand Rajput, Kiran More and Hemant Kanitkar (West), Gautam Shome, Palash Nandy and Barun Burman (East), Yashpal Sharma, Chetan Sharma and Rajender Amarnath (North), Anand Shukla, CA Mathur and Sashikant Khandkar (Central) and Syed Kirmani, Bharath Kumar and J Abhiram (South).

In addition to the 20 trainees or thereabouts at the NCA, each of the zonal academies will feature around 20 boys in their training programmes. That should allow for a wider range of talent to be represented, given that a number of impressive youngsters missed out during the Academy's inaugural session from May to September 2000. Virender Shewag, Ashish Nehra, Hemang Badani and Dinesh Mongia all failed to make the final cut. The limited infrastructure did not permit a larger batch but now with the same facilities to be spread across six different locations, there is ample opportunity for more players to reap the benefits of the most ambitious coaching exercise undertaken by the BCCI.

© CricInfo