However, the working committee rejected the idea of having an open auction, part refund of the franchise fee to Sahara and didn’t give the permission to field extra foreign players. A clearer picture on whether or not Sahara India will field its Pune Warriors side next season will emerge depending on the outcome of Tuesday’s meeting.

Sahara India believes that unless an open auction is held, teams won’t have a ‘level-playing field’. Last year, the IPL governing council allowed teams to retain up to four players ahead of the auction which meant that the new teams — Pune and Kochi (now disbanded) — didn’t get to bid for some of the top players including Sachin Tendulkar, retained by Mumbai India and MS Dhoni, retained by Chennai Super Kings.

Sahara India chairman Subrata Roy had tabled his demand to BCCI officials, including Srinivasan and IPL governing council chairman Rajeev Shukla, during a meeting in Mumbai on Sunday.

"All we wanted was a level-playing field, which was not provided to us as there was no open auction when we joined the IPL last year. We wanted a refund of 27 per cent of our franchise fee as only 74 matches were played last season instead of 94. We will continue to stick to our demand of fielding more foreign players," a top Sahara India official said.

Rules state that only four foreigners can be fielded in a playing XI but Sahara India officials point to the fact that Mumbai Indians were allowed to field five foreigners during the Champions League last year.

At the end of the working committee meeting, Srinivasan said he was hoping for a favourable response from Sahara India. "Issues that had to be decided were placed before the working committee and we have conveyed the response to Sahara and we hope the response would be favourable," Srinivasan said.

Sahara India released a document shortly, the tone of which suggested that they had already informed the BCCI officials during Sunday’s meeting that that throwing the rule book at them wasn’t acceptable.

Sahara India had withdrawn their team from the IPL auction and also the Indian cricket team’s sponsorship on February 4 after their request to add Yuvraj Singh’s price ($1.8mn) to their auction kitty was rejected among other demands.

Other decisions

* The BCCI rejected the recommendations of the Lord Woolf report concerning the restructuring of the top management of the International Cricket Council (ICC). The recommendations included a restructuring of the ICC’s executive board to make it more independent and less dominated by the bigger and more powerful countries.