Rs 2 lakh for a president?s box seat at Eden Garden

While the entry of the Indian Premier League at Eden Garden has left the 31,000 members of the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) without their usual free tickets, the city?s elite are shelling out over Rs 2 lakh per match to view proceedings from the cool comforts of the president?s boxes.

The 12 airconditioned boxes, each with 16 seats, are provided with a television, a refrigerator, a telephone and an array of snacks and beverages. In the usual course, the boxes are reserved for officials of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and the CAB.

Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan?s Red Chillies Entertainment, which controls ticket distribution at Eden for the IPL matches, is selling each seat for Rs 2,18,000 per match. ?The boxes are usually kept for BCCI and CAB officials. But this time we had to let go of them because the ticket distribution is being looked after by Red Chillies Entertainment,? said Samar Pal, joint secretary of the CAB.

Neither Red Chillies nor its appointed marketing agency GamePlan would disclose the identity of the buyers, but sources said a majority are from the real estate industry.

According to Biswaroop Dey, former assistant secretary of CAB, some of the president box tickets that were sold even had the complementary tag. Apart from the president?s boxes, Eden has 21 institutional boxes of 16 seats each that are offered to companies. Some companies had booked them in 1987 on the eve of the Relience World Cup at Rs 5 lakh. Corporates renewed the tickets in 1997 and in 2007 but it has now expired. ?The boxes are now in the hands of Red Chillies,? said Gautam Dasgupta, former joint secretary of the BCCI as well as the CAB. So, who are sitting in these boxes now? ?I am not in a possition to answer,? said Inderbir Singh Bhandari, the Kolkata head of Red Chillies. According to Jeet Banerjee, managing director of GamePlan, these boxes were not sold. ?We have given them to the sponsors of Kolkata Knight Riders,? Banerjee said. The KKR sponsors include HDIL, Reebok, Nokia, The Telegraph, Belmonte and Tag Heuer.