NEW DELHI, July 9: Groundsmen at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens have threatened to commit suicide if the cricket authorities do not meet their financial demands, including five months’ back pay, media reported on Wednesday.

About 20 groundstaff members who are on the payroll of a private company, have written to the regional cricket body threatening they would have to “take some extreme step like committing suicide”, according to Kolkata’s daily The Telegraph.

A groundstaff supervisor, Anadi Khatua, said they were daily wage employees of the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) until the private company hired them, the PTI reported.

He blamed cricket officials for not keeping their promise to settle the groundsmen’s claims.

But a cricket official said the protest was merely designed to bring pressure on the CAB to include them on its payroll.

“They have a one-point programme,” CAB’s joint secretary Amitabh Banerjee said. “The whole world is going on outsourcing and it is impractical.”

He added the protestors were refusing to collect their salaries from their employers and dismissed their threat to end their lives as “sentimental”.—Reuters