Andrew Strauss and Mahendra Singh Dhoni will be encouraged to help stamp out corruption in cricket by taking lie-detector tests as the MCC use the occasion of the 2,000th Test match to step up their campaign to clean up the game.

The controversial proposal is the brainchild of Steve Waugh, the former Australia captain, who wants leading captains such as Strauss and Dhoni to act as ambassadors and role models by voluntarily putting their reputations on the line.

Waugh is at Lord's as chairman of an MCC world cricket committee working party that was charged last year with investigating ways that corruption might be eradicated from the game, and he made his chief proposal only yards away from where Strauss and Dhoni supervised practice ahead of a Test series that will decide whether England or India finish the summer as the No1-ranked side in the world.

"Captains from each country should be promoted as ambassadors and role models who pledge to educate and protect other young players," Waugh said. "We are looking for ambassadors among team members to put up a hand and say that down the track they will do one of these polygraph tests to be the role model and the leader in their teams.

"Record numbers of players reported last year that they had been approached by bookies. These players need mentors. The culture and values of the team come directly from the captain as well as the coach and the manager."

Strauss and Dhoni, regarded as the two most successful captains in world cricket, have the status to give the MCC campaign a kickstart and, with Waugh and the rest of the MCC cricket committee at Lord's, they are bound to be privately lobbied to support the scheme over the coming days.

Captaincy apart, their respective success on the field has been identified as having a major bearing on the series. Waugh named the new-ball battle between Strauss and India's left-arm quick Zaheer Khan as a pivotal contest, while Dhoni's reputation is now so high that the England spinner Graeme Swann suggested that he was now the key India wicket, even above the great Sachin Tendulkar.

"Legally you can't force lie-detector tests on people and you can't presume guilt if people refuse to take a test – it is a voluntary thing," Waugh said. "But it is about giving the public confidence that the game is legitimate and is being played the right way.

"This is the first step in a long process of exploring how we can get the game in a better state. There are a lot of rumours out there about match-fixing and spot-fixing. I became sick and tired about being asked if games I played in were above board.

"We haven't got all the answers. It is a piece of the puzzle that might help the game. We want to work closely with the ICC's anti-corruption unit and get the ideas out there."

Waugh underwent a polygraph test in April in Melbourne, supervised by one of Australia's foremost polygraph examiners, Steven Van Aperen, a former Victoria police detective. Waugh passed convincingly and the test can be seen at lords.org/liedetector.

"As a former captain I knew that you should never ask a player to do anything that you won't do yourself," he said. "It is nerve-racking to go through the process. You sit in a room and have your heart rate monitored, your blood volume monitored, your blood pressure, sweating and respiration. After a couple of hours I was quite convinced that if someone had something to hide they would be found out during this process."

If Strauss agreed to take the test, he would be asked at one point to state the following: "I, Andrew John Strauss, do hereby declare that during my cricketing career except for manipulating matches for purely strategic or tactical reasons I never deliberately under-performed or fixed a cricket match or a passage of play within a match or did anything other than try my hardest for any cricket team I played for.

"I never received any form of payment, either in money or as a gratuity or benefit in return for under-performing in any cricket match I have played in."

The danger of false positives is a fear for anybody taking a polygraph test. Van Aperen has claimed: "Nearly 2,000 studies suggest an accuracy of about 96-98%." That is no guarantee. It is roughly the same accuracy rate as the Umpire Decision Review System – and India have ditched most of that.

Polygraph tests are inadmissible as evidence under English law, and Waugh has made no suggestion that they should be taken by the three Pakistan cricketers, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir, who face criminal charges in an English crown court later this year. All three have been charged with "conspiracy to accept corrupt payments, under the 1906 Corruption Act, and conspiracy to cheat, under the 2005 Gambling Act".

The players, who deny the charges, were banned by the ICC after a sting operation by the News of the World. The newspaper's closure in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal may yet affect the outcome of the case.

"It is not so much about dredging up what has happened in the past," Waugh said. "There have been very few players caught even though there have been a lot of rumours about activity going on. It is about looking to the future."