OPINION | Equal pay for women’s cricket isn’t charity — it’s paying them their due

Harmanpreet Kaur-led India won the 2025 World Cup

When the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) announced equal match fees for men and women cricketers in 2022, it was hailed as a landmark step. Predictably, some saw it as an act of tokenism — a well-intentioned gesture that ignored “market realities.” Some have also argued that since women’s cricket does not yet draw the same crowds, sponsorships, or broadcast rights as men’s, pay parity defies the economic logic of sport.

Structural Imbalance in Women's Cricket

Men’s cricket did not become a commercial powerhouse on its own merit alone. It was built on years of institutional patronage, media attention, and cultural reinforcement. Men’s tournaments were broadcast, celebrated, and invested in — not because the market demanded it, but because decision-makers made it so. The Board poured resources into infrastructure, talent scouting, domestic circuits, and global exposure. Sponsors followed the eyeballs, and eyeballs followed what was televised. The market was an outcome of choices — political, cultural, and economic — that privileged one gender.

Incidentally, even Test cricket — generally seen as the “purest form of the game” — survives on the oxygen of T20 and the IPL. It is heavily subsidised by the formats its purist fans like to look down upon, yet it paid Indian male cricketers handsomely. After all, these are not independent business verticals competing in a free market; they are parts of a single national enterprise.

To now invoke market dynamics as a rationale for inequality — to argue that equal pay for women’s cricket is premature and economically unjustified because it ignores market realities — is to confuse the product of bias with its justification. Women’s cricket has operated under the shadow of this asymmetry for decades: limited fixtures, sporadic telecasts, lack of facilities, poor scheduling, and negligible brand investment kept it peripheral.

True equality must begin by recognising that men’s cricket’s prosperity came from collective social investment. If the same ecosystem had nurtured women’s sport with equal seriousness, we might not even be having this debate today.

Economists often invoke “market forces” as though they exist in a vacuum. Yet, markets are shaped by policy, infrastructure, and visibility — all of which men’s cricket has enjoyed disproportionately. The same was true for other sports — kabaddi, badminton, hockey, even athletics — that were long ignored or denied prime-time television until India began producing champions and stories worth celebrating. Visibility created viability, not the other way around.

Role of Institutional Support

When women’s cricket is televised in prime slots, when broadcasters invest in storytelling and production quality, when sponsors see federations treating women’s matches as equally important — the market response will follow. Audiences grow when institutions believe in what they are showing. Equal pay is one such statement of belief — that women’s cricket deserves to be taken seriously not because of what it already earns, but because of what it can become.

The “performance-based” argument is equally flawed. In sport, pay has never been purely a function of gate receipts or ratings. Central contracts, match fees, and prize money recognise representation, not just performance. A cricketer playing for India — male or female — represents the same flag, faces the same physical risks, trains with the same intensity, and sacrifices the same years of life for their sport. The idea that one deserves less because fewer people watch is ethically untenable.

Moreover, the idea that men’s cricket “funds” women’s cricket misunderstands how it works. Revenues belong to the sport as a whole, not to one gender. Just as BCCI’s profits come from collective rights sales and the wider ecosystem of Indian cricket, those funds must be reinvested to strengthen every part of it. The men’s game flourished because of such reinvestment — from Ranji Trophy structures to world-class coaching academies.

Importance of Belief in Women's Sport

I still remember, years ago, when India hosted the Women’s Cricket World Cup, taking my kid and her eager group of primary school friends to watch India play Australia. The stadium could have held thousands, yet we were almost the only ones there — a handful of voices cheering in a space built for a roar that never came. The same kids who had seen packed IPL matches asked awkwardly why their match lacked the same fanfare.

Isn’t it curious how fashionable it has suddenly become — among the influential, the eloquent, and the well-networked — to profess deep admiration for women’s cricket? A few months ago, most of us couldn’t have named the playing eleven, yet today we speak as if we had tracked every innings since childhood. Success, it seems, has many fathers — and a few conveniently rediscovered daughters.

A similar shift is visible beyond cricket. The same country that once dismissed kabaddi as a rustic pastime now packs arenas and tunes in by the thousands for the Kabaddi League. What was once the “poor man’s sport” has become prime-time spectacle. And our official national sport — hockey — long forgotten by most of us, is finding its audience again. What changed was not the sport, but the belief around it. When we decide to see value, visibility follows.

It won’t be fair, however, to use Nari Shakti as a political narrative, when our Naris themselves are showing us leadership lessons despite being ignored or relegated to the background for decades. If at all, our public institutions — even if they remain closed-group, men’s-only clubs by invite — need to get more women sports leaders in their midst to discuss the future of Indian sports.

Rethinking Pay in Sport

Critics warn of “robbing Peter to pay Mary.” But Peter himself was made rich by decades of systemic privilege. Mary is not asking for alms — she is asking for a fair share of the institution her predecessors were long excluded from.

Indeed, the symbolic power of equal pay goes beyond finance. It tells every young girl picking up a bat that her effort is not secondary, her aspiration not ornamental. Just look at the trajectory of women’s football, tennis, and athletics globally — once dismissed as commercially unviable, now commanding record viewership and sponsorship growth.

The development of sport — any sport — is never an individual triumph; it is a national project. It takes a country to build an ecosystem: funding that endures beyond wins and losses, respect that is not conditional on visibility, and opportunities that reach every level of talent. For decades, Indian men’s cricket has enjoyed that collective scaffolding — of institutions, sponsors, schools, and fans — that turned skill into stardom and competition into commerce. It is time the same ecosystem of belief and investment embraces other sports and athletes, both team and individual. That is how nations mature — when they learn not just to celebrate excellence, but to cultivate it everywhere.

(Srinath Sridharan is Author, Policy Researcher & Corporate Advisor, Twitter: @ssmumbai.)

Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.