Deepti Sharma will never forget December 16, 2023 – when the Indian women’s cricket team hammered England by 347 runs, the biggest margin of victory in women’s Test cricket.
Deepti was the ‘Player of the Match’, with dream bowling figures of 9-39, along with a gutsy 67 in India’s first innings. Bowling the talented English team out for under 140 twice in two days is something Harmanpreet Kaur and Co. will remember for a long time. Deepti’s first-innings bowling figures of 5-7 are now part of Indian cricket folklore.
But there is another reason for Deepti and her teammates to treasure this win – Test matches are rare in the career of an Indian woman cricketer. In the last 20 years, the Indian women’s cricket team has played just ten matches.
And just for comparison, in the last ten years, the Indian men’s team has played 95 matches!
India’s women are ready to play, the BCCI is not
Yes, a complete travesty. So much cricketing talent is shut out because the game is run by men.
For cricket fans, it has been frustrating to see players like Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami and, more recently, the precocious young cricketers like Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, Shefali Verma, Deepti Sharma and Jemima Rodrigues sit out for months despite being hungry to play, despite being in the prime of their lives, despite being at the top of their form and skill.
It is even more inexcusable because today the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is one of the richest sports bodies in the world. The money, the resources, the stadiums, the infrastructure, the talent, the fans, the sponsor interest, the appetite – all of it is there, but the men in charge have been dragging their feet. For years.
Counter-arguments will be trotted out. For instance – ‘Test cricket is dying, so we have focused on ODI and T20 international (T20I) cricket for India’s women’. Or, ‘it is also tougher to market women’s Test matches’.
The Indian men’s cricket team has played 95 Test matches in the last ten years, and the women’s team’s has played ten matches in the last 20 years. Photo: X/@BCCI.
The response is simple – if Test cricket is dying and hard to sell, then why are the men playing it? Because it is still the purest form of the game, the ultimate test of every aspect of cricketing skill. Why should India’s women’s cricket fanatics be kept away from that thrill?
Indian women’s cricket is viable, so what’s the excuse?
Yes, we do see fewer spectators in stadiums and lower TV ad rates for Test cricket, but we haven’t let these affect men’s Test cricket. The income from white-ball cricket is sustaining red-ball cricket. And if that’s okay for men’s cricket, it should be okay for women’s cricket too.
Yes, the amount of white-ball cricket being played by the Indian women’s team has gone up, and BCCI officials are quick to claim brownie points for that, but let’s face it, their reasons are not altruistic.
The fact is, women’s white-ball cricket is now lucrative – broadcasters reportedly paid over Rs 950 crore for media rights over five years for India’s Women’s Premier League.
The numbers tell a story
Also, while the girls are playing more white-ball cricket, they still lag behind the boys. Here are some more numbers – since January 2022, the Indian women’s ODI team has played 22 matches. The men have played 59 matches. The women have played 44 T20 internationals, the men have played 58.
Clearly, the men have a packed year, while the women have huge unexplained gaps in their calendar. The men play more white-ball cricket than the women, they play more red-ball cricket than the women and they play a longer IPL than the women too. Can the BCCI tell us why?
The women play a shorter IPL than the men. Photo: X/@wplt20.
The BCCI’s male chieftains should either put away their male egos and give our women cricketers their due, or they should make way for more women in India’s cricket administration; not just at the top, but at the state and district levels as well. It has been a stag party for far too long.
Pay parity? Not really
In October 2022, the BCCI announced ‘equal match fees’ for India’s men and women team members – Rs 15 lakh per Test, Rs 6 lakh per ODI and Rs 3 lakh per T20I.
A positive step, but it doesn’t fully address the gender disparity. First, because, as we have seen, the women play far fewer matches, especially Tests, for which the fees are highest.
Also, gender parity is still not being applied to the players’ annual contracts. And here, the disparity is embarrassingly vast.
To understand this better, let’s return to Deepti Sharma. She is a Grade A player – the highest grade for women players – along with Harmanpreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana. Her annual contract salary is Rs 50 lakh.
But what’s the Grade A+ contract amount for Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, Jasprit Bumrah and Ravindra Jadeja? A whopping Rs 7 crore! And that is gender disparity. In fact, the contract amount for Grade C male players, the lowest grade, is Rs 1 crore.
I don’t mean any disrespect towards Deepak Hooda – he is a sincere, talented cricketer and has played a bit for India, but should his contracted salary be double that of India’s women’s team captain? How is that fair or justifiable in any manner?
Surely the BCCI is aware of this disparity, but do they have any plans to set it right? We don’t know.
Also read: Can the Indian Sportswoman Speak?
Fans embrace women’s cricket, why is the BCCI shy?
And just FYI, in terms of sheer popularity amongst the fans, to understand how the women have really caught up with the men, here’s a good metric – on Instagram, Jadeja, who is quite a darling of the fans – known as ‘Sir Jadeja’ and ‘Jaddu’ and with his signature ‘bat as talwaar’ celebration after every big innings – has 7.6 million followers.
And Smriti Mandhana, currently India’s top woman batter, has 8.6 million followers!
So, the fans have fully acknowledged and embraced women’s cricket; it’s just the BCCI that’s lagging behind in giving them the respect and space they deserve and are due.
Remember Mithali Raj?
Way back in 1999, Mithali Raj, then just 16 years old, made an astonishing start to her international cricket career, scoring 114 against Ireland.
That is when the BCCI should have taken note of her and of the rising tide of female cricketing talent in the country. But it did not.
Photo: X/@M_Raj03.
Mithali Raj retired in 2021. On the way, in ODI cricket, the format in which she was allowed to shine, she set major records – the most ODI runs by a female player (7,805), the most matches in a career (232) and the longest career ever (over 22 years).
Could she have crossed similar milestones in Test cricket? Yes, but she never got a chance. In a 19-year career, she got to play just 12 Test matches, leaving her thirsting for so much more. Even in that short career, her 214, scored in just her second Test match, at the age of 19, remains the highest score by a female teenage Test cricketer.
What a shame, what a miss, what a loss!
Today, Deepti Sharma is 26, playing alongside young stars like Shefali Verma (19), Pooja Vastrakar (24) and others. These girls playing for Team India are looking towards the BCCI for a fairer deal.
Also, watching them play is the next generation of Indian girls, dreaming of wearing the country’s colours. It’s up to the BCCI, as the custodians of Indian cricket, to get it right.
Rohit Khanna is a journalist and video storyteller. He has been managing editor of The Quint, and is a two-time Ramnath Goenka Award winner.
