Women’s World Cup Glory Exposes India’s Long-Neglected Sports Infrastructure for Girls

What a win for the Indian women’s cricket team it turned out to be. There’s no cricketing aficionado who would have been left untouched by the campaign that the women in blue mounted—slow and stumbling at the start, coming into their own later in the tournament, beating the mighty Australians in the semis, and then powering over the South African team to clinch the title.

Even those disinterested in cricket have hailed the glorious win as a metaphor for something beyond mere cricket or any other sport. It symbolises a triumph of women’s determination, myriad sacrifices of their families and coaches, and their overcoming of socio-cultural barriers and structural issues to prove that they could be the champions.

In the wake of this stirring win, and taking a cue from cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar’s appeal that women must have access to safe facilities at sports grounds, the Maharashtra government has articulated its intention to now include a women’s changing room in sports facilities and stadiums and so on.

We are in 2025, rather, we have come to a quarter of the 21st century without this basic facility that might make women, or young girls, a tad more comfortable if they choose any sport or athletics. That it took the World Cup in our women cricketers’ hands for this should show us how appallingly short our sports fall—especially for girls and women.

For sure, cricket is not the only sport in which this has come to pass. We have heard, with anguish, what the women wrestlers have had to take in their stride to simply take the floor—from lack of facilities to alleged sexual harassment followed by police lathis when they protested it.

It cannot be any different in other sports or athletics. Why should women and young girls have to put up with so much just to take up sports? This is only one of the many structural issues that women or young girls must grapple with, but at least having such facilities would go a small distance.

It’s not as if there has been a dearth of women sporting icons. This cricket team has had, only from Mumbai and Maharashtra, top-line players like Jemimah Rodrigues, Radha Yadav, and Smriti Mandhana. All three with sterling contributions in this World Cup campaign, who have inscribed their names in the annals of history. All of them with cricketing lives etched into Mumbai/Maharashtra. In fact, each player in this team comes with a daughter-of-the-soil connect to their hometown or village.

They have inspired, and will continue to inspire, young girls who have sports talent or the ambition to play sports. As did a certain PT Usha, India’s youngest sprinter and the first Indian woman to reach the finals of the Olympics, often called the Payyoli Express, an icon for my generation of women interested in sport or athletics. If PT Usha could be a champion, we could too. Or so we thought till we realised that there’s a system out there which refuses to recognise talent purely on merit or just crushes your soul in multiple ways.

One of them is the cesspool young girls have to deal with—the socio-cultural barriers cannot be wished away even with the rise of someone like Harmanpreet Kaur or Amanjot Kaur and coaches who think nothing of sexual harassment of their wards. But surely the structural issues can be dealt with.

Facilities matter, and matter a great deal, if more young girls have to take to sport or athletics. It is not good enough that a few who struggle against the odds and rise to the top—and amass the well-deserved accolades and riches—do so in spite of the lack of facilities. Their parents or relatives went out of their way, their coaches fought at multiple levels, and they themselves sacrificed a lot.

What does it take for governments to create infrastructure for women’s sports? A shift in perception and a re-prioritisation of the place of women’s sports in our society. Provide the changing rooms and other facilities, to start with. It surely did not need Tendulkar to appeal for this.

Every neighbourhood in Mumbai must have sports training and recreation facilities that are necessarily public in nature, allowing access to space, equipment, and coaching for those who are really interested and take their sports seriously. Yes, the facilities for men’s sports, with the exception of cricket, are not world-class even in Mumbai, but at least they exist.

There is no point looking up budgets of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC)—two cities that between them house millions of girls and young women with interest in sports. Such a budget does not exist.

Sports spending is subsumed under the education budget; the sports budget includes spending for both men and women, and there are no prizes for guessing where the priorities lie. Perhaps, having a dedicated sports budget with allocations for women’s sports would be a good structural step to take in the civic budgets of Mumbai and Thane.

The suburb of Mumbra made national headlines when nearly 150 girls, a majority of them Muslim, learnt to play football and competed in tournaments. But women’s sports should not only need a movement like this or the cricket World Cup campaign; it needs infrastructural facilities and safe environments, intentionally created by those in power. Let’s hope the changing rooms are a start and much is done after. The World Cup would then be even more remarkable.

Smruti Koppikar, an award-winning senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and can be reached at smruti@questionofcities.org.

Published on: Friday, November 07, 2025, 03:13 AM IST