Researched by: Sara Varghese 

First, tell me about this IPL for women

On March 25, the BCCI announced that the first tournament will be held in 2023. The statement by President Sourav Ganguly was a bit vague: “It has to be approved by the AGM [Annual General Meeting of the BCCI]. We plan to start it by next year, hopefully.” Despite the fuzzy rhetoric, we at least have some details on the league. There will be five or six teams in the inaugural edition. And the ten men's franchises will be given the first right of refusal to buy the women's teams. At least four of them are interested.

Point to note: India is coming very late to the game. Australia already has the very popular Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL)—with eight teams playing 59 matches. New Zealand and England host the Super Smash-Women and the Kia Super league respectively. Pakistan has announced its intention to start a similar tournament next year. A number of Indian players—like Smriti Mandhana and Harmanpreet Kaur—already play in these leagues, and have profited greatly from the experience.

As for this year: We will have to make do with the Women's T20 Challenge—with four matches and three teams—which will be held during the IPL playoffs. Started in 2018, the BCCI considered the exhibition tournament “an adequate showcase for women's T20 in India” until now.

Point to note: Despite the lack of marketing efforts by the board—and tepid media coverage—there is huge public interest in women’s cricket, especially when the team is doing well. For example, 105 million tuned in to the 2020 edition of the T20 tournament. And when India reached the final of the 2020 World Cup—losing eventually to Australia—it became the most watched ICC women’s T20 event in history. And there has been plenty of interest from big Indian brands—Jio, Tata Motors, Paytm etc—in sponsoring the T20 tournaments.

Ok, I’ll take the history lesson now…

Lol! And we will do our best not to make it boring. 

The beginning: While Indian men played professional cricket since the colonial era, there was no women’s team until 1973. That’s when an enterprising gentleman named Mahendra Kumar Sharma registered the Women's Cricket Association of India (WCAI). He became the founding secretary, while Begum Hamida Habibullah—a legendary feminist and politician—was its first president. See her with Indira Gandhi below:

A quick rise: The first Women's Inter-State Nationals were held in 1973—with just three state teams, Bombay, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. But within two years, that number grew to 14. More importantly, a flurry of other tournaments followed suit—and for all age groups—including the Rani Jhansi and Indira Priyadarshini trophy competitions.

On the international stage: The WCAI became a member of the International Women’s Cricket Council (IWCC) in 1973. And Australia’s under-25 team played the first international women’s series in India in 1975—three three-day matches of which the historic first was held in Pune. Here are the two teams posing with PM Gandhi:

Other international test series followed in quick succession—and were met with with great interest:

“The New Zealand, Australian and England players played in skirts while the Indian and West Indians played in trousers. Watching girls play in skirts was a novelty for the large number of spectators and touring teams were very surprised to have such a large audience. The matches abroad hardly drew any crowds and were played on club grounds whereas in India the international matches were played at regular cricket stadiums.”

The World Cup: India made its Women’s World Cup debut in 1978—and hosted the tournament entirely by accident. South Africa was the selected host, but it bowed out due to an international boycott protesting apartheid. Our first One Day International outing was led by the great Diana Edulji:

Our team didn’t win any matches, however, and the trophy went to Australia (it’s astonishing how absurd the skirts look to the modern eye):

Point to note: India later reached the World Cup finals in 2005, 2017 and 2020.

The loss of independence: For decades, the Women's Cricket Association of India was an independent body that called its own shots—unlike women’s cricket associations in Australia and England. But in 2006, it was absorbed by the BCCI—a union that did not serve women’s cricket well. 

Data to note: A comparison of men’s vs women’s matches played between 2006 and 2016 tell the sorry tale. The number of ODI matches played by Indian women (95) was a paltry 32% of those for men (300). In comparison, the ratio for New Zealand: 221 for men vs 126 for women. If you take out ICC and tournament matches, the actual number of bilateral matches organised by the BCCI drops to 60. Also this: as of 2017, the BCCI website did not list the women’s names under the category ‘Indian Team’.

Quote to note: In 2014, an angry Nutan Gavaskar—younger sister of Sunil—said:

“Instead of acting as a foster mother, step-motherly treatment is given to WCAI. Neither we are getting the ground nor technical support like availability of coaches etc. It (BCCI) failed to hold any test match of women's cricket during the last eight years.”

So the BCCI has ignored women’s cricket?

That’s too strong a statement. There is no doubt that the board has given the women’s team many resources—financial and material. But they remain a distant second in the list of priorities—a list drawn up by a BCCI dominated by men. And that double-standard often becomes glaringly obvious: 

One: In 2021, the board hiked the salaries of both women and men players—but the announcement only served to underline the yawning wage gap. Senior women players are now paid around Rs 20,000 per day—equivalent to the salary of an Under-19 male player. The women’s pay categories are: Category A (Rs 50 lakh), Category B (Rs 30 lakh) and Category C (Rs 10 lakh). Men, OTOH, have four levels: A+ (Rs 7 crore), A (Rs 5 crore), B (Rs 3 crore) and C (Rs 1 crore). The lowest ranked male player earns twice as much as the highest ranked woman.

Quote to note: In 2017, Ravi Shastri called a salary of Rs 2 crore for a top-ranked Category A male player “peanuts”—even though the BCCI had just doubled all the men’s salaries.

Two: Not only does the BCCI pay the women far less, it is slow to pay them what is already owed. The team was the runner up in the 2020 World Cup finals—and was owed $500,000 in prize money. Yet 14 months after the tournament, the BCCI had still not distributed the money. In stark contrast, winners Australia received their due within a month, while semi-finalists England got theirs in two. The board’s response: “The problem stems from the tax dispute BCCI has been having with ICC. If we pay the players currently, they will have to suffer double taxation.” It is hard to imagine the men’s team accepting that as an excuse.

Three: BCCI’s lack of interest in the women’s team is most painfully obvious on social media, as Vinayakk Mohanarangan points out in Scroll. Where every men’s team match and achievement is marked by a flood of tweets and posts—the official handle barely acknowledges international matches played by women. There is just one media manager for the team—unlike other countries which have an entire in-house team.

Why this matters: Sounds like a petty quibble but it reflects the lack of interest in marketing the women’s team: 

“A good social media presence is important for the board to promote the sport, for the players to reach fans and potential sponsors, and for sponsors who attach themselves to women’s sport, which offers fast-growing commercial opportunities world over.”

When there is little effort to promote the team, it reinforces the classic excuse to sideline women’s cricket: People don’t watch or care.

Four: As we noted before, the BCCI has a fairly shoddy record when it comes to organising international fixtures for women. And the pandemic made that step-fatherly attitude glaringly obvious. In 2020—while the board worked overtime to stage the IPL and push through the men’s tour of Australia—it pulled the women’s series in England without a second thought—and despite the English board promising to arrange proper Covid protocols. Then it used Sri Lanka’s lengthy quarantine protocols to axe that series. And it kept talking up series against West Indies and South Africa—which never materialised.

Why this matters: So the women’s team—which reached the World Cup finals in 2020—spent a long time playing zero international cricket. As former Indian skipper Anjum Chopra pointed out at the time:

“The idea is to get the girls back in action and BCCI will have to find a way forward. If the girls are not playing they will tend to lose form and momentum. It’s not easy to just walk out and perform.”

The fallout: Australia, New Zealand, England and West Indies were back on the field—and that advantage became painfully obvious in the current World Cup—where India crashed out after losing four out of seven matches, not even making the semi finals.

A circular trap: The BCCI does not make an effort to ensure women play more matches—or market the team. Then it uses the consequences of its negligence to sideline the women. Here’s Prem Panicker in Scroll explains how this works

“A ‘top’ board official says ‘The Board welcomes the idea (of a women’s version of the IPL) but there are many hurdles and the biggest involves having a pool of players who would meet international standards.’ Which is as good an example of a circular argument as you will find: we don’t have enough cricketers because we don’t play enough because we don’t have enough cricketers because…”

Or as former Indian bowler Snehal Pradhan puts it: “Wins create visibility. Visibility creates value. Value translates into revenue.” But you can’t win if you don’t play. 

Key point to note: A women’s IPL league is the best answer to many of the above woes: More money, more matches and more experience. Countries which have a women’s cricket league are already seeing the benefits: 

“As women's cricket becomes more competitive, Australia and England have stayed ahead of the curve thanks to their large pool of international-ready players, as a result of the professional T20 competitions. The opportunity to play in the best stadiums, alongside the best players, in front of packed crowds with many others watching it on television acts as the perfect recipe to get domestic players ready for the big occasion of international cricket.”

The bottomline: We often dismiss IPL as a grossly commercialised tamasha. But it is also the secret sauce that turbocharges men’s cricket. Now women can finally get a taste.

Reading list

Prem Panicker’s 2017 piece in Scroll is excellent—and sums everything that’s wrong with how BCCI treats the women’s team. Scroll also has an excerpt of a report that makes a strong case for a women’s IPL league. Karunya Keshav in Wisden argues a women’s IPL—while necessary—may not be good for international cricket. Read The Print for more on that massive wage gap. ESPN and SheThePeople have the history of women’s cricket in India.