Lata Mangeshkar

Calcutta: Times have changed.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) was quick in disbursing the cash award — Rs 80 lakh for all except Yuvraj Singh, who got a whopping Rs 1.8 crore — to the Mahendra Singh Dhoni-captained World Twenty20-winning squad, but it was very different in 1983.

Back then, Kapil Dev and his World Cup-claiming men had to wait for weeks before each of them received Rs 1 lakh. The reason? Believe it or not, there wasn’t enough in the BCCI’s coffers!

“The BCCI needed Rs 14.5 lakh (the additional Rs 50,000 for manager P.R. Man Singh), but the money just wasn’t there… Eventually, Lata Mangeshkarji was requested to help by staging a fund-raising concert. She did and saved the BCCI’s face,” a former administrator told The Telegraph.

The concert, which raised Rs 20 lakh, was held in the capital’s Indraprastha Stadium.

Two decades later, when Jagmohan Dalmiya was president, the BCCI “repaid its debt” by making an exception when Lata requested a fund-raising match for her Pune hospital.

The fund-raiser was staged soon after the 2003 World Cup, a tournament where Team India (led by Sourav Ganguly) made the final.

“That’s the least the BCCI could’ve done for Lataji,” the former administrator added. Indeed.