For years Australians have been spoiled by having the best cricket team in the world - their own - demolish all comers.

There's never really been a point where your average cricket fan has had pause to complain about what he or she is seeing because for so many years the Australian game has been the standard bearer for the international game, both in terms of playing quality and organisation.

But no more.

Like a clobbered Yuvraj Singh six, this year's Indian Premier League circus blew all those preconceptions out of the ground.

The best players from around the world were drafted in for the 44-day willow-and-cherry lollapalooza, paid an exorbitant amount of money for their troubles, and the whole shebang was a runaway success.

So much so that the sport here, especially at state level, is starting to look like it's played on a different planet.

No wonder the peak cricket body, Cricket Australia, now is scurrying to get a piece of the action.

In December the first-ever Champions League Twenty20 competition will take place in India, featuring two Australian state sides alongside the two IPL finalists, two South African teams, English county Middlesex and Sialkot from Pakistan.

The venues for the December 3-10 event have yet to be decided.

Each will be vying for the lion's share of US$6 million in prize money, which dwarfs the relative beer and peanuts on offer in Australia.

Suddenly a sport that wasn't able to offer much to state players financially if they didn't have the luxury of Cricket Australia contracts is offering some fairly juicy incentives, and they're all coming from India, the undisputed cradle of power in the game.

An amazing state of affairs when you consider Kapil Dev, the great Indian all-rounder, recently took the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to court to keep getting a modest pension they were threatening to take away from him. He claimed it was his only source of income.

Big stars such as Sachin Tendulkar are now routinely pocketing tens of millions of US dollars a year in salaries and endorsement deals.

The money currently getting pumped into Twenty20 cricket in India is breathtaking. Off the scale. 

But, for me, there is something inherently perverse, even sick, about a country that sees fit to pay its top cricketers such extraordinary sums of money while "untouchables" in the drought-stricken state of Bihar, the home state of pin-up boy Mahendra Singh Dhoni, are being encouraged to eat rats just to survive.

Vijay Prakash, a government boob for the state's welfare department, is on record as saying the 2.3 million Musahars of Bihar, the lowest of the low in the caste system, would simultaneously "save about half of our food grain stocks by catching and eating rats and secondly, improve the economic condition of the Musahar community.

"Rats have almost no bones and are quite rich in nutrition. People at large don't know this cuisine fact but gradually they are catching up."

Is this 2008? The 21st century?

How can any right-minded person - fan, administrator, sponsor or player - indulge in the spectacle of 20-over pyjama cricket while some poor young Musahar boy or girl is being compelled to eat rats?

The former Australian Test captain Steve Waugh did some magnificent work in drawing attention to and uplifting the miserable lives of some of India's poorest people, but there is much more that can be done.

In my opinion, that should include our Champions League-bound Australian cricketers.

To turn a blind eye to such indignities while stuffing their pockets with wads of cash would be nothing short of unconscionable.