Mohali, Ahmedabad and Bangalore will host the three Test matches against Pakistan next month.

The Programmes and Fixtures Committee of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, which met in Mumbai on Thursday, also announced that the matches in the One-Day Internationals series, which will be played after the Tests, would be staged at Kochi, Vizag, Kanpur, Jamshedpur and Delhi.

The Pakistan team, which arrives in India on February 25, will also play two practice games during the tour, the first of which will be a three-day match against the Board President's XI in Dharmshala, Himachal Pradesh, before the Test series begins.

The second will be a one-day game before the ODI series.

BCCI secretary S K Nair said the dates for the matches would be finalized after the Programmes and Fixtures Committee discusses the logistics with the Pakistan Cricket Board.

He said the list of venues would be submitted to the Central government for approval and necessary security arrangements.

As per the BCCI's rotation policy Mumbai was not in the race to stage a match.

The Ferozshah Kotla in Delhi, which is undergoing renovation, was allotted a One-Day International as it is unlikely to be ready in time for the Test matches.

"The Delhi stadium work is in full swing and it will be ready to host a match in the first week of April. So it has been allotted a one-dayer, subject to prior inspection," Nair added.

"In consultation with the PCB we have scheduled the tour to begin from February 25 till April 10. However, the dates might change and there might be a delay by a day or two in the dates when the final itinerary comes out, as nothing has been confirmed yet."

Nair also reiterated that the match dates announced earlier are tentative, and the final itinerary will be worked out soon in consultation with the PCB.

BCCI vice-president Kamal Morarka said India will provide better facilities than Pakistan did when the Indians toured the country last year.

"We would like to provide them the best security," he added.

Nair sounded confident about the second charity one-dayer for victims of the tsunami disaster between the Rest of the World and the Asian XI being held in Kolkata.

'The game is most likely to be in Kolkata, but a decision [on tax exemption] has to be made by tomorrow,' ICC [Images] chief executive Malcolm Speed [Images] had said on Wednesday.

The game could be shifted to Lahore [Images] in Pakistan, Dhaka in Bangladesh or Colombo in Sri Lanka [Images], Speed had added.

Morarka also sounded optimistic about the Indian government exempting the match from tax and Kolkata staging it.