India Women's Cricket History: 1976 to World Champions

On the last day of October in 1976, eleven women walked out at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore to play the first women's Test match staged in the country. The association running the team was three years old. There was no board money behind it, no contracts, no pathway, and no expectation beyond getting through the fixture. India drew that Test. Forty-nine years later, on a Sunday evening at Navi Mumbai, the same team won a World Cup.

That arc is the story. It is not a smooth one, and for most of its length it was carried by a small number of extremely stubborn people.

Before there was a team

Women played organised cricket in pockets of the country well before there was a national side. Club sides existed in Bombay, in Bengal, in parts of the south, and a handful of universities ran competitions, growing out of the same club and school culture described in the origins of cricket in India. What did not exist was a body to bind them together or a fixture list worth training for.

The Women's Cricket Association of India was formed in the early 1970s and affiliated itself to the international women's body of the day. It had almost no money. It organised inter-state competition, negotiated tours, and persuaded railways and state associations to give players travel concessions. Everything that followed grew from that administrative work, which is why the association's founders are named in histories that never mention a score.

1976: the first Test series

The West Indies toured in late 1976 for a six-Test series, which sounds extraordinary now and was normal then, because Test cricket was the format women's teams played when they played each other at all.

Shantha Rangaswamy captained India, the first woman to do so. In the first innings of that opening Test at Bangalore she made 74. The match was drawn, as were the second at Madras and the third at Delhi. Then, in the fourth Test at Patna in the third week of November, India won by five wickets: the first Test victory in the team's history, in its first series. The tour finished with a further draw at Lucknow and a defeat at Jammu.

Test	Venue	Result
First	Bangalore	Drawn
Second	Madras	Drawn
Third	Delhi	Drawn
Fourth	Patna	India won by five wickets
Fifth	Lucknow	Drawn
Sixth	Jammu	West Indies won by an innings and 24 runs

Rangaswamy went on to make the first Test century by an Indian woman, on the tour of New Zealand that followed early in 1977. She later served on selection and administrative bodies, and for decades her name was the answer to a question most cricket followers could not answer.

Diana Edulji

If one player carried the first three decades, it was Diana Edulji. A left-arm spinner from Bombay, she bowled long, accurate spells in an era when the team played rarely and travelled badly, captained the side, and kept playing into the 1990s. For a long stretch she was India's leading wicket-taker in women's Tests.

Her significance is not only statistical. Edulji spent her career and much of her retirement arguing publicly for the women's game to be resourced properly, at a time when doing so cost her friends inside the administration. She received the Arjuna Award and later the Padma Shri, and she was appointed to the Supreme Court-mandated Committee of Administrators that ran the BCCI during its reform period. A player who spent her career being told the money was not there ended up sitting on the body that controlled it.

The World Cup years, 1978 to 1997

India entered the Women's World Cup for the first time in 1978, when the country hosted the second edition of the tournament. The side was outclassed. The point was that it was there.

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the team improved in fits. Tours were infrequent, sometimes years apart, and players held jobs. Neetu David, a left-arm spinner from Kanpur, produced an innings return against England in the mid-1990s that stood as the best in a women's one-day international for a very long time. Sandhya Agarwal made runs at a level that would have made her famous in any better-funded system.

The 1997 World Cup was held in India and remains a landmark for reasons unconnected to India's own performance. The final at Eden Gardens, between Australia and New Zealand, drew a crowd that contemporary reports described as one of the largest ever assembled for a women's cricket match anywhere. India lost in the semi-finals. But the tournament established that the audience existed, which was the argument everyone had been losing for twenty years. The grounds that hosted it are covered in the guide to India's iconic cricket stadiums.

Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami

Two careers, running almost in parallel for two decades, define the modern era.

Mithali Raj made her one-day debut in 1999 as a teenager and scored a hundred in it. Three years later, at Taunton, she made 214 against England, which was then the highest individual score in a women's Test. She batted in a style that belonged to an older tradition: upright, unhurried, built on placement rather than power, and she went on batting that way through the arrival of the T20 era and the strike-rate arguments that came with it. She captained India in two World Cup finals, seventeen years apart. When she retired in 2022 she was the leading run-scorer in the history of women's one-day international cricket.

Jhulan Goswami came from Chakdaha in Bengal, travelled hours each way to train, and became a genuinely fast bowler in a system that had never produced one. She was named the international player of the year in 2007, led India's attack for the better part of two decades, and finished as the leading wicket-taker in women's one-day internationals. Her last match was at Lord's in 2022, and the players who lined up to applaud her off included several who had grown up watching her.

What the two of them provided, beyond the numbers, was continuity. A player entering the Indian dressing room at any point between 2002 and 2022 found at least one of them in it.

The three finals India lost

Between 2005 and 2020 India reached the last match of a global tournament three times and lost all three. Each defeat did something different to the game at home.

2005: Centurion

India reached a World Cup final for the first time in 2005, in South Africa, with Mithali Raj as captain. They beat England in the semi-final. In the final at Centurion they came up against an Australian side at the height of its powers and lost comfortably.

Almost nothing changed at home as a result. There was no broadcast momentum, no sponsorship rush, no restructuring of the domestic game. The team returned to a schedule of a handful of matches a year. The following year the Women's Cricket Association of India was merged into the BCCI, which brought the women's game under the same administration as the men's and, in the medium term, into the same financial system. The immediate effect was smaller than the long-term one.

2017: Lord's

Twelve years later the situation was different, and the difference was television.

India's 2017 World Cup campaign in England began with Smriti Mandhana taking apart the hosts in the opening match. It peaked in the semi-final at Derby, where Harmanpreet Kaur made 171 not out against Australia, an innings that shifted from careful to violent in the space of an hour and knocked out the defending champions.

The final at Lord's was as close as a World Cup final gets. England made a modest total. India, chasing, were in a winning position deep into the innings before a collapse. Anya Shrubsole took six wickets. India were bowled out nine runs short.

Losing that final did more for the women's game in the country than winning the 2005 one would have. The match was watched by an enormous television audience at home. Players who had been anonymous a fortnight earlier were on the front pages. Sponsors arrived. Within a few years the board was under sustained public pressure to run a franchise competition, pay the players properly, and expand the domestic calendar, and the pressure came from ordinary supporters rather than from inside the game.

2020: the MCG

The 2020 T20 World Cup final was played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 8 March, International Women's Day. Australia beat India by a wide margin. The result is not what the match is remembered for.

The crowd was 86,174, a figure that stands as one of the largest ever to watch a women's sporting fixture. India had reached the final unbeaten in the group stage, having beaten Australia in the tournament opener, with Shafali Verma opening the batting at sixteen and hitting the ball as hard as anyone in the competition. The semi-final was washed out and India went through on group standing, which left them arriving at the final without a knockout under their belts. Australia's openers took the game away inside the powerplay and India never recovered.

Two years later India won a silver medal at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, losing another final to Australia. A pattern was becoming uncomfortable: India were reliably good enough to reach the last match of a tournament and had not yet won one.

Pay parity, 2022

In October 2022 the BCCI announced that centrally contracted women cricketers would receive the same match fee as their male counterparts for internationals across all three formats.

The detail matters. Match fees were equalised. The annual retainer bands, which are the larger part of a contracted player's income, remained different, and the board did not claim otherwise. What the announcement did was remove the single most indefensible line in Indian cricket's accounts, and it did so before most other boards had moved. Several followed within a couple of years.

Milestone	When	What changed
First Test	1976	India played, and drew, at Bangalore
First Test win	1976	Fourth Test of the same series, at Patna
First World Cup hosted	1978	India entered the competition
WCAI merged into the BCCI	2006	Women's cricket brought under the main board
First World Cup final	2005	Lost to Australia at Centurion
Second World Cup final	2017	Lost to England at Lord's by nine runs
T20 World Cup final	2020	Lost to Australia at the MCG before 86,174
Equal match fees	2022	Same international match fee as the men
Women's Premier League	2023	A full franchise competition with an auction
World Cup won	2025	Beat South Africa in the final at Navi Mumbai

The Women's Premier League

The WPL began in 2023 with five franchises, a live player auction, and a broadcast slot that treated it as a main event rather than a curtain-raiser. Mumbai Indians, captained by Harmanpreet Kaur, won the first season. Royal Challengers took the second.

The competition did three things quickly. It paid a professional wage to a large group of Indian players who had previously earned very little. It put those players in the same dressing room as leading Australians, English and West Indians for six weeks a year, which is a form of coaching no academy can replicate. And it gave the age-group system something to aim at, in the way the IPL did for the men's game two decades ago.

What it imported along with the money

It has also imported the problems of the men's competition, which are traced season by season across the history of Indian cricket. The auction rewards a particular kind of cricketer, the calendar squeezes the multi-day game, and a poor season can define a young player's earnings for a year. The structure and history of the competition are set out in full in the Women's Premier League guide, and the mechanics of the auction it uses are the same ones described in our IPL auction explainer. Australia's equivalent, the Women's Big Bash League, had a nine-year head start and is the obvious comparison.

Test cricket, revived

Women's Test cricket nearly disappeared. India played almost none between the mid-2000s and 2021, and a generation of internationals retired without ever wearing whites.

It has returned in a limited form: one-off Tests, usually attached to a limited-overs tour, played over four or five days. India have won multi-day matches at home against strong opposition in recent years, including a first Test victory over Australia, and Shafali Verma made a double century in one of them. The matches are infrequent and the pathway barely supports them, because the domestic women's calendar is built around white-ball cricket in the same way the men's calendar increasingly is. The tension is identical to the one described in the Ranji Trophy guide, with far less first-class cricket to absorb it.

2025: the World Cup

India co-hosted the fiftieth-over World Cup in 2025 and won it.

The tournament turned in the semi-final at Navi Mumbai, against Australia, the side that had beaten India in two finals and knocked them out of more competitions than anyone could count. Australia made 338. India chased it down, the highest successful chase in the history of women's one-day international cricket, on the back of 127 not out from Jemimah Rodrigues and 89 from Harmanpreet Kaur, who put on 167 together for the third wicket.

In the final against South Africa at the same ground, India made 298 for 7, with Shafali Verma making 87 at the top of the order. South Africa were bowled out for 246. Deepti Sharma took five wickets in the final and finished the tournament with 215 runs and 22 wickets, which is as complete an all-round campaign as the competition has seen, and was named player of the tournament.

It was India's first World Cup in any format in the women's game, at the third final. The team that lost at Centurion in 2005 and at Lord's in 2017 and at the MCG in 2020 finally won one at home, in front of a full house, on national television. Whatever the domestic game builds over the next decade will be built on that evening.

What still has to be fixed

The senior team is well resourced. The layers beneath it are not, or not yet.

• Domestic women's cricket is played on fewer grounds, with less coverage, and with a shorter season than the men's equivalent.
• Multi-day cricket barely exists below international level, which makes selecting a Test side an exercise in projection.
• Facilities and coaching quality vary enormously by state, and the association-by-association structure means a talented girl's odds depend heavily on where she is born.
• The pipeline of fast bowlers remains thin, for the same reasons it is thin in the men's game and then some.

None of that is an argument against what has been achieved. It is a description of the next twenty years of work.

The rest of the domestic and international game sits on the cricket in India hub, the women's rivalries that draw the biggest audiences follow the same fault lines described in the India-Pakistan rivalry guide, and how other boards have handled the same questions is covered in cricket around the world. If you would rather be tested than told, there is a cricket quiz and a playing XI builder.

Sources and method

This article draws on published scorecards and match records for India's women's Tests, one-day internationals and World Cup matches; BCCI announcements, including the October 2022 statement on match fees; and contemporaneous reporting of the 1976 series, the 1997 tournament, the 2017 and 2020 finals and the 2025 World Cup. Where crowd figures, record claims or career totals are disputed between sources or have since been superseded, they are described qualitatively rather than stated as fixed numbers. Our own player datasets cover the men's franchise game and contain no women's records, so no figure in this article is computed from them, and none is presented as ours. This site is independent and has no affiliation with the BCCI, the ICC, the WPL or any ground.