Gender parity on the front foot

Women's cricket finally gets the attention it deserves

On February 13, 409 women cricketers will be up for auction for the inaugural Women’s Premier League (WPL), to be held from March 4 to 26 in Mumbai. This marks a great leap forward for women’s cricket in India in a series of encouraging developments over the past five months, the latest being the victory of the under-19 team in the inaugural Women’s World Cup. The good news really began in October last year, when the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) announced pay parity between men and women cricketers across all formats, making it one of the few global cricketing administrations to do so. In January, after the WPL was announced, Reliance-backed Viacom secured the WPL media rights for five seasons (2023-27) for Rs 951 crore, outbidding Disney Star. Some days later, auctions of the five teams for the maiden tournament netted the BCCI Rs 4,670 crore, with Adani Sports bidding the highest (Rs 1,289 crore) for the Ahmedabad franchise. Though these amounts are pennies compared to the sums poured into the men’s Indian Premier League (IPL), for which the media rights alone went for Rs 48,390 crore, the numbers exceeded the BCCI’s expectations. Few expected auction earnings to cross Rs 4,000 crore.

This hopeful beginning still marks a long distance in terms of catching up with men’s cricket. Unlike individual sports such as badminton, wrestling, boxing, and weightlifting, where women have barged into the limelight by dint of their achievements, women’s cricket has long played a poor cousin to the men’s game. This, despite the fact that the Indian women’s team holds records that the men’s team does not. There is Jhulan Goswami, once the fastest bowler in women’s cricket, who is the highest wicket taker in one-day internationals (ODIs); openers Poonam Raut and Deepti Sharma hold a record for their 320-run partnership in a 2017 ODI against Ireland; and Raut and Thirush Kamini hold the record for a second-wicket partnership of 275 against South Africa. And then, of course, there is cricketer extraordinaire Mithali Raj, the only Indian captain, in men’s or women’s cricket, to have led the side to two World Cup finals. She is also the youngest centurion in ODI cricket — again, across both genders — scoring a match-winning knock of 114 against Ireland in 1999 at age 16 years and 205 days.

These records went largely unnoticed because they were achieved within teams of middling quality — plus the fact that media coverage was poor because sports channels were reluctant to broadcast women’s cricket matches. But the Indian women’s cricket team now figures among the top two in all formats —second in Tests, and first in ODIs and T20 — earning it the attention it deserves. The WPL should do much to put women’s cricket on the map in India. By participating in the most popular format of the game and including foreign players, the WPL will, like the IPL, pit Indian women against global standards, widen the social catchment area for aspiring women cricketers, and ensure that, at the very least, they make a decent enough living. The time for Indian women cricketers to move beyond a boundary has clearly arrived.