It was March 2020, and the final of the Women's T20 World Cup was being played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Over 86,000 fans packed the stands — a world record for a women's sporting event. India was facing Australia. The noise was deafening. The moment felt tectonic.
India lost that day by 85 runs. But something else was born in that stadium that night: a movement. The image of those 86,000 people — families, kids, men in blue jerseys — didn't fade. It became the spark that lit a fire under women's cricket in a country that worships the men's game.
The League That Changed Everything
Three years later, in 2023, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) launched the Women's Premier League. The auction numbers made headlines: the first player picked, Smriti Mandhana, went for ₹3.4 crore (about $415,000). The total spend on 87 players crossed $7 million. For women's cricket in India, this was alien money.
But the WPL wasn't just about cash. It was about visibility. Matches were broadcast on prime-time TV, played in stadiums that had only ever hosted men's games. Delhi's Arun Jaitley Stadium, Mumbai's Wankhede — these were cathedrals of the men's game, now hosting women who could actually fill them.
Take Shafali Verma. Before the WPL, she was a teenager with a powerful bat and a social media following that was growing, but barely. After the league, she became a brand. Endorsements, magazine covers, interviews with news channels that had never bothered to ask a woman cricketer anything beyond "How does it feel to play like the men?" The WPL forced the Indian sports media to finally look at women's cricket as a product — a serious one.
Money Talks — And It's Loud
The financial shift is stark. Before 2020, even the best Indian women cricketers earned less than ₹50 lakh ($60,000) a year from BCCI contracts. After the 2023 World Cup win? The board introduced a central contract system that put the top women in the ₹1 crore ($120,000) bracket. Match fees jumped from ₹15,000 per game to over ₹1 lakh. For the first time, a woman cricketer in India could make a decent living without a side hustle.
But the real game-changer was the WPL. The five franchises — Mumbai Indians, Delhi Capitals, Royal Challengers Bangalore, Gujarat Giants, and UP Warriorz — not only paid well but also invested in training infrastructure, foreign coaches, and support staff. Suddenly, Indian women players were training in the same facilities, using the same technology as the men's IPL stars.
"Two years ago, I was teaching cricket to kids in a park for extra money. Now I've bought my parents a house." — a WPL player, speaking on condition of anonymity
The ripple effects are visible across the country. Grassroots participation in women's cricket has exploded. The BCCI reports a 35% increase in registered female players since 2022. State associations that once ignored women's teams are now scrambling to build academies. The reason is simple: cricket is a business, and women's cricket is now profitable.
The World Cup Trophy That Broke the Ceiling
In March 2023, India won the Women's ODI World Cup. They beat England by 5 wickets in a final that had the entire country glued to screens. The winning moment — Harmanpreet Kaur lifting the trophy, tears streaming down her face — was splashed across every front page, every news channel. The Prime Minister tweeted. Bollywood stars sent congratulations. For one week, women's cricket was the only cricket in India.
The victory wasn't just symbolic. It unlocked sponsorship deals that had been non-existent. Before the World Cup, the Indian women's team had one major sponsor: a sports shoe brand. After the win, they signed three new sponsors within six months, including a telecom giant and a car manufacturer. Collective sponsorship revenue for the team jumped from $2 million to over $15 million in two years.
And the BCCI, which had long treated the women's team as an afterthought, suddenly found religion. In 2024, they announced equal match fees for men's and women's centrally contracted players. The decision wasn't purely altruistic — the board knew that the women's game was now a commercial asset worth protecting.
But Not All Is Rosy
Let's not pretend this is a fairy tale. The revolution is real, but it's incomplete. The WPL currently has only five teams — compared to the men's IPL's ten. Player salaries, while life-changing, are still a fraction of what men earn. The top women's player in the WPL makes around $400,000 a year; the top men's IPL player makes over $2 million. The gap is huge, and the BCCI shows no urgency to close it.
Grassroots infrastructure remains patchy. Most state teams still practice on substandard pitches. Girls in smaller towns face cultural barriers — parents who don't see cricket as a "respectable" career for daughters. The visibility of the national team hasn't fully trickled down to the local level.
There's also the question of sustainability. The WPL's first season was a success, but can it hold audience interest without a men's IPL-style marketing machine? Will advertisers stay if ratings dip? The league is still fragile.
And then there's the administration. The BCCI, for all its newfound attention, remains a boys' club. The women's team has no dedicated selection committee; the men's committee handles both. There's no female representation in the BCCI's top brass. The revolution may be televised, but the backroom still looks like a 1990s boardroom.
The Road Ahead
For all the caveats, the direction is unmistakably upward. Young girls in India now grow up seeing women's cricket on TV, in newspapers, on billboards. They know Shafali Verma, Smriti Mandhana, and Harmanpreet Kaur by name. They wear their jerseys. They dream not of being Sahil or Virat, but of being themselves on a cricket field.
The real test will come in the next five years. Can the WPL expand to eight teams? Can the BCCI sustain its investment through a slump in viewership? Will the cultural change reach the smallest villages?
One thing is certain: the spark lit in Melbourne in 2020 is now a fire. And in a cricket-mad nation of 1.4 billion, once a fire catches, it's hard to put out.
