On any given day, you can find Subash Bahadur Shahi in his office cabin at the Sudur Paschimanchal Academy (SPA) in Dhangadhi, where he is a director, making policies for the college. But take him out of the school and he is reborn as a cricket campaigner who has blazed the trail in order to establish Dhangadi as the ‘City of Cricket’.

At 33, Shahi is credited for providing the impetus for bringing a new era of professionalism in Nepali cricket by holding an auction of cricketers for the Dhangadi Premier League (DPL) last year. Having already done so regionally, Shahi 

helped Nepali cricket make a giant leap by creating a national-level auction of players for a city-based franchise Twenty20 competition.

DPL is into its second edition and now the Rs 30-million tournament has ensured that Nepali cricketers can not only have an exciting domestic tournament to play in but also take home handsome paychecks while doing so. But Shahi is more than the SPA, DPL or the Dhangadhi Cricket Academy (DCA), where he is the president. 

The love of cricket that he found as a student had propelled Shahi to bring the entire community from Dhangadi together. “It was during my BHM (Bachelor in Hotel Management) days at White House College in Kathmandu that I got more attached to sports, I particularly began taking cricket as my own game,” says Shahi.

“The environment there was very sports-oriented. I played under Binod Das (former U-19 skipper); and Paras (national team skipper Paras Khadka) and Lakpa Lama used to be our teammate for the college team. This was during the glory days when Nepal had begun stunning Test giants at the U-19 level and the game’s popularity was rising meteorically. It left a lasting love for the game in me,” Shahi reminisces of his college days.

Shahi saw a majority of his friends leave the country seeking better opportunities after abroad. For the others, Kathmandu remained a favoured city, but Shahi decided to head back to his hometown, Dhangadi, to see what he could do there. And cricket was the obvious choice.

The inception

Shahi and a small team he put together first initiated the Hotel Devotee SPA Cup—an inter-college cricket tournament that featured national cricketers—in 2010. The event was played at the Dhangadi Stadium, a football ground, for the first few editions and was later shifted to the larger, proper SSP cricket grounds in Dhangadi.

Under the banner of DCA and SPA, Shahi also started the Dhangadhi Cricket League (DCL) by involving local franchises. The second edition of the DCL witnessed Nepal’s first-ever auction of cricketers, although it came at a local level. Shahi then decided to merge the two tournaments into the Dhangadi Premier League, taking Nepali domestic cricket to a new height altogether.

DPL was an instant hit as it not only held a national-level auction of cricketers but also became the tournament with the highest ever cash-prize in domestic cricket history, where the champions walked away with Rs 1.5 million. DPL is now into its second edition and will award the winners with Rs 2.5 million this time around. 

It is a testament to Shahi’s dedication and guile that a tournament with a total budget of Rs 25,000 and a title sponsor of Rs 10,000 is now worth Rs 30 million. As a tournament that will now also see international recruits, DPL has managed to put Dhangadi onto the map of global cricket. This is what Shahi takes the most pride in, despite the first edition not reaping much financially. 

“We are not worried that the tournament has not been able to give us financial return. We have the entire community supporting us and the way Dhangadi is now followed internationally is the biggest return for us. We came up with a small concept and to see it become so big is immensely satisfying,” Shahi says.

Dream Fapla

Just a few kilometres from the current DPL venue lies a place called Fapla which was nothing more than a barren waste land five years ago. Now along with hosting the DPL, the Dhangadi cricketing community has set forth a campaign named ‘Dream Fapla’. The campaign wants to convert Fapla into an international standard stadium with state-of-the-art facilities and a seating capacity of 40,000. 

For the past three years, Shahi and his team have worked tirelessly in order to turn the barren land at Fapla into a cricket ground. Along the way, they lobbied the government to allocate budgets for it and succeeded, with a total of Rs eight million eventually being secured. However, the team knows that there is a long way to go still.

For that reason, Shahi has been seeking to run the entire project under a Public Private Partnership. “If we keep on waiting for the government to allocate a budget and for it to trickle down to the local level, it might take us at least 20 years to give Fapla the shape that we have been dreaming of,” says Shahi, “The best way to get the work done is to apply a PPP model to it. The private sector is ready to help and if public share is issued then it will give everyone ownership. This way, the work at Fapla can be completed within three years.”

Shahi’s plans for the Fapla could be a watershed moment for Nepali sports as, once the policy is implemented, it will open gates for other sports disciplines to follow suit along the same lines. Shahi believes the campaign to make Dhangadi a ‘City of Cricket’ will only be realised once Fapla becomes an international stadium. And with the strides the region has been taking, it might not be too outlandish a prospect for this Far-Western town to put itself on the cricketing map long before Kathmandu does.