Once the mud-slinging and horse-trading have been swept out of the way, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will spend a tiny slice of their annual meeting considering the small matter of the domestic first-class structure. The Board's technical committee, chaired by Sunil Gavaskar, has made sweeping proposals for both first-class tournaments – the Ranji Trophy and the Duleep Trophy. If their suggestions are approved, from the 2002-03 season the Ranji will be a two-tier system (three-tier really, because the lower division would be further broken into two groups), while the Duleep would be the closest possible simulation of Test cricket, notwithstanding the recommendation that it should be played on uncovered pitches.

The debate will boil down to one question: is there merit in a tiered system? England has swung that way in the last two seasons, and the reviews have been mixed. Some say that it has merely ensured that top players from one division don't play against top players in the other; others reckon that it has injected competitiveness into a lifeless structure.

Whether or not it has worked in England, it is worth trying in India. For a start, no country in the world has as disparate a pool of teams as India: bad as Derbyshire may be compared to Yorkshire, it could never be anything like the difference between Tripura and Mumbai. A team in a slump is different from one that has never had, and is not likely to have for a long time, money, infrastructure or even a natural inclination towards cricket. For reasons sometimes beyond their control, the have-nots are too far removed from the haves.

The drawbacks of a tiered system are well known. How will young, talented so-and-so manage to test himself against players of international calibre? And while it does ensure that teams of similar strengths are pitted against one another, it cannot guarantee that their top players will be available: between October and March every year, the period during which the Ranji Trophy slowly unfolds, the number of days off for the Indian cricketer could be counted on one hand.

For all that, it must still be considered as a step up from the current system, which routinely breeds bullies who get more complacent with each passing season. It's no wonder that the best Indian international cricketers are those thrown into the big bad world before domestic cricket has had a chance to spoil them. The existing system, like the laughable format of the 1996 World Cup, stretches any team only in the knockout phase after a shamelessly blissful passage through the zonal league. The new proposal at least promises to reduce the number of uncompetitive matches on view. For the first time, nine matches might actually mean nine real matches.

There's a hidden bonus, too. Since the plan also eliminates the zonal round-robin phase entirely, it promises to reduce the regional bias in the national selection committee. The national selector from each zone would be forced to assess an assorted platter of players. In the current system, 60 of the 74 matches are played between teams in the same zone. It would hardly be surprising, would it, if a selector – however unbiased he might be – pushed through one of the lads he's spent all season watching?

No new proposal will auto-generate a champion team, but the way forward is fixing a system that is past its sell-by date.

Rahul Bhattacharya is a staff writer with Wisden.com India.

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