Sunil Gavaskar, who captained India for a period of his playing career, has argued that admitting Plate-division sides into the Ranji Trophy has drawn down the overall standard of the tournament. In a column for a news channel, Gavaskar also expressed the view that the Lodha panel's recommendation to extend Ranji Trophy participation to all states and Union Territories had the effect of bringing down the overall standard of the competition.

Launched in the 1934–35 season with competing sides arranged across four or five geographic zones, the Ranji Trophy maintained that structure until a format overhaul took effect after the 2001–02 campaign. Starting from the 2002–03 season, a two-tiered league structure — with an Elite Group at the top and a Plate Group below it — took over from the zonal arrangement that the BCCI had previously operated.

Four Elite Groups — labelled A, B, C, and D — make up the current Ranji Trophy structure, with each group drawing together eight competing teams. Within the Plate Group, which fields six sides, the leading pair advance to contest the Plate Final, with the winner earning a place in the Elite Group when the following season gets under way.

Gavaskar expressed the view that performances and milestones achieved in the Plate Group ought not to be measured against those from the Elite Groups, pointing out that the Ranji Trophy's Plate Division had itself been producing record-breaking batting and bowling figures. He pointed out that the performances in question take place within the Ranji Trophy, and that the competition's standing is precisely what gives those achievements their status as official records.

Six north-eastern and Himalayan states — Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Sikkim — have been placed together within the Plate Group bracket of the Ranji Trophy competition scheduled for 2026–27. Gavaskar pointed to thin infrastructure across most Plate teams while also drawing attention to the practice of bringing in players from outside their home states.

Two cricketers drafted in from outside Mizoram's home pool — Manendra Singh of Rajasthan and Chinmay Sutar of Mumbai — are set to feature for the state side as guest players in the 2026–27 Ranji Trophy. Among the cases often cited when discussing cross-state player movement in domestic cricket, Iqbal Abdullah — who turned out for Sikkim during the 2019–20 season after representing Mumbai — and Stuart Binny, a Karnataka product who featured for Nagaland in that same campaign, illustrate a broader pattern that Gavaskar, a member of India's 1983 World Cup-winning squad, attributed to structural gaps in newer state programmes: those associations, he noted, lacked adequate facilities and consequently drew on players who had been unable to secure places in their home-state sides, with the Plate Division offering an avenue that their original states had not.

Whenever those teams faced opponents from the Elite division, the results pointed to a noticeable difference in quality between the two tiers.

A governance dispute within the Arunachal Pradesh cricket association — rooted in a rivalry between two internal factions and complicated by proceedings before the Itanagar bench of the Gauhati High Court — led the state side to concede their opening Ranji Trophy Plate Group fixture against Nagaland, which had been set to get under way on Sunday at Ahmedabad. Arunachal Pradesh's Under-19 team also forfeited their Vinoo Mankad Trophy match against Sikkim in Bhubaneswar on Thursday after an administrative deadlock within the state cricket body left no authorised group in place to select players for the fixture.

Nabam Vivek took on the presidency of the association following elections conducted in September. Several district associations subsequently turned to the Gauhati High Court, lodging petitions that pointed to alleged procedural irregularities in how the elections had been conducted. An interim order from the High Court has put on hold the BCCI's ability to constitute an independent selection panel along Bihar's model.