The veteran, who turns 73 next month, was given charge of Rahul Dravid's side a day after South African Graham Ford turned down India's offer to coach the team.

Borde, a top order batsman and widely respected as a shrewd thinker of the game, played the last of his 55 Tests in 1969 and captained India in one match.

He later served as chief selector from 1999-2002, but was currently leading a retired life at his home in the western city of Pune.

Borde will manage the Indian team for the five one-dayers against Ireland, South Africa and Pakistan in Belfast and Glasgow between June 23 and July 3 and the subsequent full tour of England.

Bowling coach Venkatesh Prasad and fielding coach Robin Singh during the three-month tour will assist him.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will continue their search for a full time coach after Ford's refusal to take up the 300,000-dollar a year job.

"Borde will manage the team in England as we look for a coach," said BCCI secretary Niranjan Shah after a board meeting here.

Ford, a former South African coach, said on Monday he preferred to continue as director of cricket with English county Kent after being offered the India job on Saturday.

India are seeking a permanent coach to succeed former Australian captain Greg Chappell, who quit in April after India's first round exit from the World Cup.

Former captain-turned-commentator Ravi Shastri, who served as interim coach for last month's tour of Bangladesh, declined to continue citing media commitments.

Ford's snub has shaken the BCCI, a rich and powerful player on the world stage with ambitions of making its current president Sharad Pawar the International Cricket Council chief in 2008.

Former captain Sunil Gavaskar, who was on the seven-member coach selection panel that picked Ford, admitted: "We are back to square one and that is a fact of life."

The BCCI are unlikely to go back to former England spinner and current Middlesex director John Emburey, who was also interviewed on Saturday and rejected.

The panel, headed by Pawar and also including Shastri and another ex-captain Srinivas Venkata-raghavan, had earlier spurned former Sri Lanka and Bangladesh coach Dav Whatmore, who was keen to take up the job.

The BCCI's apparently ham-fisted search for a coach has drawn flak from the sport's leading website Cricinfo. "By not advertising for the post or sending out feelers as soon as Chappell left for Australia, the board seriously overestimated its own hand," Cricinfo wrote.

"The promise of a big fat payday may lure those more mercenary but a top-level coach requires all sorts of assurances before taking up a job of such magnitude.

"Will they find a new coach before India's Test series against England begins?

"For a start, do they even know where to look? This is an embarrassment that the BCCI has brought upon itself."