I'm thinking more in a medium term sense here. Whether this means that you could set up a structure where four five months of the year is IPL concentrated, and another 5 months is the normal first class structure. With a longer season, a greater premium is placed on the quality of the homegrown players.
Hopefully this encourages further development expenditure from the franchises, rather than reliance on cherry picking the best kids from the Indian system. The search for the kids will see them being signed up at younger and younger ages, and I'm sure that all those involved in the cricket operations side of these franchises understand that playing longer versions of the game is still going to be vital for the development of Twenty20, from a mental and technical point of view.
Over the long term, I think that there is the possiblity of a tie-in with franchises and FC cricket, more likely to be in an informal manner but from a cricketing sense, the franchises will have to understand that the more that they put into the system that provides them with their main resource, the greater on-field rewards (and by extension, increase likelihood of off-field returns) will be.
I suspect the problem is more severe in India (on the one hand) than in Australia and South Africa (on the other hand) for example. In India the base for traditional cricket is less strong, the younger population is already a massive proportion of the populace and growing at a phenomenal rate, the game is firmly in the hands of those with ABSOLUTELY NO LOVE for anything, as far as the game is concerned, but its money spinning worth and, of course, the money that can be made is phenomenally large. Add to that the fact that the drop in spectators for the longer version is much sharper here than in the other two (at least when playing countries like England, India and South Africa, and you can see that the problem not only emanates (sort of) from India but is also most acute in India.
This raises two very pertinent issues.
One, the more weight India carries (by which I mean BCCI and those who are in power in the Indian cricket structure) the more world cricket will be rocked (read radically challenged for irreversible and wide ranging changes to the game) in a manner that is harmful to the conventional game. The fact that this may finally kill the golden goose (something akin to the scenario I have painted) is not something that bothers the 'trader' community that is running the game in India today. I use the word 'trader' very carefully. Its not just because the Marwaris (Modi is a Marwari) are a trader community but because the trader has absolutely no long term strategies that tie him to a specific business. Manufacturers, also interested in the final goal of strengthening the bottom line, can see the costs involved in a change of product and manufacturing - not the trader. He sells one product today, another tomorrow, a third the day after.
I digress. So those in authority in Indian cricket consist of those who can't conceive of the goose being finally killed from the knife or the 'overwork' and those who don't want to and don't care. The former are too dumb and the later have too much of 'Marwari' blood in them to be enamoured to the goose. Thus, in an ironic manner, while India has the power (read moolah-generating capacity) to keep the game alive, it has all the other negatives that can kill it.
Its important that the world cricket community and the ICC realise this fact and devise their strategies accordingly.
Two, The salvation of the traditional form of the game may lie with the original three Test nations; of these Australia and South Africa are more important because of the strength of their cricket today and England because of its links with the game, with these two countries (and others) through cricket and with the traditions of the game. A split of the game into two blocks has often been talked of in recent times. Everytime someone brings up the topic, he is shouted down since no one wants to even think of such a 'terrible' scenario. Its a family, with its internal stresses and strains, both economic and cultural as the growing tribe moves in different directions, refusing to accept that the time may have come when a split may actually do less harm than sticking together for money but disagreeing violently on basic and vital issues.
ICC did not show the balls to call Packer's bluff in the 1970's they need to call India's now. Unfortunately their own house is in no better condition today than it was then. Controled by bureaucrats (read English clerks) they were too slow to react to anything that needed action when the game started going downhill in the fifties and it continued getting worse. This time round, buoyed by the greenbacks they have allowed the trader and the moneylender to throw out the lazy and procrastinating bureaucrat and while it may look that speed has been injected into the operations, greed has been the real addition and it has percolated all over the game and affected everyone who was involved in the game. More critically the money has brought in others, not traditionally involved with cricket, viz sponsors, marketing companies, players' agents, electronic media giants and so on. There is a chain through which the financial health of the game is now in the hands of these outside agencies and they are linked to the game through those who we term cricket authorities. It used to be MCC and then ICC but today it is BCCI who has ICC on the leash. Thus virtually, BCCI is the middleman through whom the other agencies excercise complete control of the game.
This link has to be broken.
But is ICC strong enough to do it? One wonders.