On July 20, 2017, Harmanpreet Kaur performed what was, arguably, crucial innings by an Indian lady cricketer. Her audacious 171 runs off 115 balls towards heavyweights Australia within the semi-final of the ICC Women’s ODI World Cup turned the knock that made Indian audiences start to see “women’s cricket” as what it actually is: cricket.
Almost 5,000 miles away from Derby, England, the place Kaur was dismantling the defending champions’ bowling assault, 15-year-old Uma Chetry discovered her objective. In her native membership in Assam’s Golaghat district, Chetry obtained goosebumps simply listening to the rating. Between juggling faculty, farming duties along with her mother and father, and cricket follow, she would watch the highlights on repeat. She declared to her teammates, “One day, I want to bat like that. One day, I want to play with Harmanpreet Kaur.” Seven years later, on July 7, 2024, Chetry turned the primary lady cricketer from the Northeast to make her India debut. The blue cap was handed to her by captain Kaur herself.
Uma Chetry throughout a T20 match between India and West Indies in Navi Mumbai, December 2024.
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Emmanual Yogini
Like Chetry, Kranti Goud’s story too is about uncooked expertise bursting by in cricket’s much less celebrated geographies. Back in 2017, in Ghuwara village close to Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, 14-year-old Goud was main her district staff to the ultimate of a U-19 match. Local coach Rajiv Bilthare was struck by her “speed that can only be God’s gift”. That spark matured into a powerful spell, with six wickets in simply her fourth worldwide match, handing India a uncommon ‘away’ collection win towards England this July.
India’s Kranti Goud in motion throughout an ODI match between India and Australia in New Chandigarh on September 17, 2025.
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PTI
Cricket was far from an possibility for N. Shree Charani from Andhra Pradesh’s Kadapa district, greatest recognized for its temples and karam dosa. According to her father Chandrasekhar Reddy, a junior employee at a thermal energy plant, cricket being a staff sport, his daughter, good at athletics, kho kho, volleyball, wouldn’t get “noticed”. Except, future had different plans for {the teenager} who simply needed to “play, play, play”.
At this 12 months’s Women’s Premier League (WPL), Shree Charani, 21, took 4 wickets in simply two video games for the Delhi Capitals. That was sufficient for India coach Amol Muzumdar to hail her because the “find of the tournament”. Within months, she was fast-tracked into worldwide cricket. With 10 wickets in India’s T20 collection win over England — the place she was named Player of the Series — will probably be secure to say Shree Charani’s father needed to eat his phrases, and fortunately so.
Bowler N. Shree Charani throughout an India vs. Australia ODI match in New Chandigarh, September 14, 2025.
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SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR
Chetry, Goud and Shree Charani are extra than simply newcomers in India colors; they carry small-town goals to the grandest stage of all of them — the ICC Women’s ODI World Cup, which kicks off on September 30. More than half of India’s 15-member squad can be making their World Cup debut. They are signposts of a bigger cultural shift: cricket breaking out of its metropolitan mould even additional, households and communities recalibrating their concepts of what their daughters are able to, and younger girls from India’s Tier 2 and three towns dreaming massive.
India captain Harmanpreet Kaur (proper) with Kranti Goud after their win within the Metro Bank One Day Series between England and India, July 2025.
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Many firsts
• Indian girls are eyeing their first-ever World Cup trophy (solely the U19 girls have received twice, not the senior staff).
• Australia are the defending champions and probably the most profitable staff in ODI World Cups — with a file seven wins.
• Apart from Australia, solely England (4) and New Zealand (1) have received the World Cup.
• India (Guwahati, Indore, Vizag, Navi Mumbai) are the hosts, however Sri Lanka (Colombo) too is among the venues as Pakistan can not compete on Indian soil. (All Pakistan video games can be performed in Colombo.)
• This 12 months, for the primary time, there can be an all-woman match officers panel (14 umpires and 4 match referees).
Period of development
No one understands this higher than former India captain Jhulan Goswami, whose personal journey from Chakdah to Kolkata within the late 90s — two hours every approach by prepare simply to get to a floor — is as legendary as her wickets tally. “We are a nation undergoing transformation, and today you will see women in arenas that were unseen and unheard of, say 10 years ago,” she says. “The population is young, and every girl wants to do something worthwhile with her life. Cricket is just another medium. The sport has always been popular, and invokes so much pride. Now, finally, it has started giving financial security to the girls.”
“The population is young, and every girl wants to do something worthwhile with her life. Cricket is just another medium. The sport has always been popular, and invokes so much pride. Now, finally, it has started giving financial security to the girls”Jhulan GoswamiFormer India captain
Goswami and her long-time teammate and partner-in-record- breaking, Mithali Raj, have lived by the full-circle of the story of ladies’s cricket in India. They began their careers earlier than the ladies’s recreation got here below the ambit of the Board of Cricket Control in India (BCCI), and the gamers have been nearly all the time broke. “We were emptying our family’s pockets to play for India,” remembers Raj, the best run-scorer (throughout codecs) in girls’s worldwide cricket. “We used to organise everything on our own, tour after tour, purely because of our passion for the game.”
When the Raj-led staff returned from South Africa as World Cup runners-up in 2005, it was in anonymity, identical to a lot of their careers had been till then. Days later, every participant obtained a cheque for a paltry ₹9,000 from staff sponsor Sahara. In sharp distinction, when the Indian males’s staff returned as runners-up in 2003, they have been handed plush residences in Sahara’s Amby Valley in Pune, along with cheques from a number of sources.
Former India captain Mithali Raj throughout the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup 2025 trophy unveiling occasion in Bengaluru, September 13, 2025.
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PTI
The 2017 World Cup, the place all matches have been televised dwell, and India completed runners-up, marks the clear dividing line between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ eras of Indian girls’s cricket. The International Cricket Council’s digital and social media platforms garnered a file 100 million views, doubling the protection that the ladies’s recreation was badly in want of. “Not once were we made to feel like we lost the final,” Raj says, of the time they returned from England.
Until then, she and Goswami had spent their lives bringing laurels to the nation, all in obscurity. “I had never been so busy and in so much demand ever in my life,” says Goswami, of the numerous interviews, studio visits, occasions, shoots and public appearances within the months that adopted. The subsequent few years, capped by one other runners-up end within the 2020 T20 World Cup, have been marked by unprecedented development.
Breaking generational patterns
Royal Challengers Bengaluru captain Smriti Mandhana trains throughout the Women’s Premier League 2025.
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Murali Kumar Okay.
But it was actually the WPL in 2023 that modified the grammar of alternative for girls’s cricket in India. Institutionally, it has been probably the most vital change, particularly in a system the place home gamers nonetheless await formal contracts. And for the primary time, the ladies in blue have been being valued. Batter Smriti Mandhana’s ₹3.4 crore take care of Royal Challengers Bengaluru made headlines, however the ripple impact was felt deeper, as even uncapped home gamers started incomes life-changing sums in a single public sale.
“After WPL, you can finally say, yes, cricket can be a profession,” says Raj. “Earlier, families saw cricket as a gamble, now they see it as a career.” In addition to WPL, nearly all Indian states now have their very own T20 leagues for girls, which implies extra recreation time, extra probabilities to get observed by expertise scouts, and naturally, extra money.
But salaries inform solely half the story. Beyond funds, the league has given these girls one thing much less tangible however extra highly effective — confidence. They need to be seen, and heard. For the girls from smaller towns, the hurdles have all the time been larger — lengthy commutes, fewer amenities, elevated social scrutiny. But taking part in in entrance of packed crowds in Tier 1 stadiums in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi means the present era doesn’t shrink below stress, they flourish. Their method to the sport is fearless too, far from the nervy, risk-averse method of their predecessors. “The league has prepared this current lot for international cricket,” says all-rounder Jemimah Rodrigues, a part of the ODI World Cup squad. “They are ready to give it their all and are not afraid to express themselves. It doesn’t matter if they fail, but the spirit and energy is something else and that rubs off on the whole team.”
India’s Jemimah Rodrigues takes a victory selfie along with her staff after India received towards England within the Women’s Metro Bank ODI collection in England, July 2025.
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Getty Images
This confidence isn’t only a cricket story; it mirrors a bigger shift in India. Of younger girls changing into engineers, pilots, law enforcement officials, military personnel, entrepreneurs — their visibility itself changing into a type of energy. For all of the data, contracts, and World Cup goals, the that means of this shift is maybe greatest understood within the quiet rewards at house, the place moms play a proactive position in breaking generational patterns.
Mother is aware of greatest
In Golaghat, Uma Chetry’s mom is aware of what sacrifice means. Married younger, her personal education was lower brief, and life turned a cycle of caring for and elevating six kids. Through all of it, she stood firmly behind her solely daughter’s seemingly unbelievable cricketing dream. Today, when Chetry returns house with a brand new sari for her mom, she sheds a quiet tear. Not simply out of pleasure, but additionally satisfaction that her daughter’s destiny received’t be the identical as hers.
In Kadapa, Shree Charani’s mom has just one factor to inform her daughter: “Chinna, you do whatever you want to, I am with you.” That unflinching religion has discovered its reward. When Shree Charani got here again from the England tour in July, she gifted her mom with a gold ring — a reminder that her religion was by no means misplaced.
India’s N. Shree Charani at a follow session in Mohali, September 12, 2025.
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Getty Images
For Kranti Goud’s household, the sacrifices have been maybe larger. After the bowler’s father misplaced his job as a police constable, her mom offered her jewelry so their daughter might maintain taking part in. This July, after Goud’s heroics in England, her village celebrated by placing up congratulatory posters in her title. One day, some strangers adopted these posters all the way in which to her house; discovering Goud away, they posed as a substitute along with her mom who now basks within the glow of her daughter’s fame.
For these moms, the satisfaction is private. But for the nation, the that means is bigger. Daughters are not exceptions; they are position fashions. And as India heads into a house World Cup, these tales from the smaller towns and villages remind us that ladies’s cricket isn’t just a sporting motion. It is a part of a deeper social transformation, of households rewriting what is feasible for his or her daughters. And of India itself slowly, however absolutely, conserving tempo with their goals and ambitions.
Dreams that when led to dusty village grounds now stretch to the world’s greatest stadiums and largest competitions. And in that arc lies the story of a altering India — the place younger girls not await permission to dream, however declare the highlight as their very own.
The author is an impartial sports activities media skilled and writer of the award-winning ebook Free Hit: The Story of Women’s Cricket in India.