Women's Domestic Cricket in India: Railways to the WPL

The most successful team in Indian women's domestic cricket is not a state. It is an employer. For most of the past two decades the Senior Women's One Day Trophy has belonged to Railways, a side assembled from women who hold railway jobs across the country and are released to play cricket, and understanding why that is tells you more about the women's domestic game in India than any fixture list.

The structure beneath the India women's side is now large — thirty-seven state and territory teams, a full ladder of age-group nationals, zonal tournaments with first-class status and a franchise league at the top. It was not always so. For its first three decades the entire national championship was run by volunteers out of borrowed offices, on money the organisers raised themselves, by a body the men's board did not recognise.

This page covers the domestic competitions: where they came from, how the season fits together, who wins and why, and how a player gets from a state age-group side to a Women's Premier League contract. The national team's story is told separately in the guide to India's women's national team history.

A championship built from scratch in 1973

Women's cricket in India was organised before it was funded. The Women's Cricket Association of India was registered in Lucknow in 1973 under the Societies Act, driven by its founder-secretary Mahendra Kumar Sharma, and it staged a national championship in April of that same year with exactly three teams: Bombay, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.

That championship grew quickly. Within a few years dozens of state associations had affiliated, and the WCAI nationals became the competition through which every Indian woman cricketer of the first generations passed — Diana Edulji, Shantha Rangaswamy and, later, Mithali Raj, Anjum Chopra and Jhulan Goswami all came up through it. The association ran international tours on the same shoestring. Players travelled by train, often unreserved, and stories from those decades involve dormitories, borrowed kit and gate collections.

What the WCAI never had was money or leverage. It was a separate body from the men's board, with none of the men's board's broadcast income, and by the 2000s the gap between what the players needed and what the association could provide had become the defining fact of the women's game.

November 2006: the takeover

The end of the WCAI came from outside India. The International Women's Cricket Council merged into the ICC in 2005, and member countries were expected to bring their women's games under their main national boards. The WCAI was merged into the BCCI in November 2006.

The takeover was neither instant nor smooth in its effects. The BCCI brought the women's nationals into its own domestic calendar, put state associations rather than the old women's associations in charge of teams, and standardised the tournaments — but for the first decade the women's competitions ran on a small fraction of the attention given to the men's. The verdict on the merger has shifted over time: it removed the women's game's independence, and it also, eventually, delivered the funding, central contracts and pay reforms that the WCAI could never have financed. Both things are true, and people who lived through the transition still argue about the sequencing. The wider shape of the board that absorbed it is set out in the guide to how the BCCI is structured.

The senior season as it stands

The BCCI now runs a women's domestic season that mirrors the men's in outline, though not in volume. The main components:

Competition	Format	Teams
Senior Women's One Day Trophy	50 overs	Thirty-seven state and territory sides in groups, then knockouts
Senior Women's T20 Trophy	20 overs	The same entry, run as a separate tournament
Senior Women's Inter Zonal One-Day Trophy	50 overs	Six zonal sides
Senior Women's Inter Zonal T20 Trophy	20 overs	Six zonal sides
Senior Women's Inter Zonal Multi-Day Trophy	Multi-day, first-class	Zonal sides
Senior Women's Challenger Trophy	50 overs	Selection-based sides drawn from the best nationals performers

The one-day and T20 nationals are the base of the pyramid: every affiliated state and territory enters, the entry is divided into groups, and group winners progress to knockouts. The inter-zonal tournaments sit above them as a representative tier — six zones, including a North East zone created when the newer associations joined — and function as a shop window, since a zonal squad is close to a national trial.

The multi-day tournament deserves its own note. A two-day inter-zonal competition began in 2014-15, ran as a three-day event for the following three seasons, and was then discontinued — which meant that for several years India picked Test cricketers who had never played a first-class match. It was revived in 2023-24 with first-class status, restoring the longer format to the domestic calendar at exactly the time India's women resumed playing Tests regularly.

The season runs through the Indian winter alongside the men's programme, and faces the same compression problems described in the guide to how the monsoon shapes India's cricket season: a great deal of cricket squeezed into a window that also has to hold internationals and a franchise league.

Railways, and why an employer beats the states

Railways have won the Senior Women's One Day Trophy around fifteen times — far more often than any other side — and for long stretches the final was effectively Railways against whoever survived the other half of the draw.

The dominance has a simple mechanism. Indian Railways has offered sports quota employment to women cricketers since the WCAI era — Diana Edulji, the great left-arm spinner of the first generation, was a Railways employee — and a railway job was for decades the only way an Indian woman could earn a living connected to cricket. The best player in almost every state therefore took the job, joined the Railways team, and stayed. Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami both spent their domestic careers there. The states, meanwhile, kept producing players and kept losing them at exactly the moment they became good.

It is the same institutional pattern that once let Railways' men win the Ranji Trophy, but it lasted far longer in the women's game because the alternative earnings simply did not exist. What finally weakened it was money arriving from elsewhere: BCCI contracts, better match fees and WPL deals mean a top player no longer needs the railway job, and state sides now keep more of their best. The clearest sign of the shift came in 2024-25, when Railways missed the one-day final — a rarity in itself — and Madhya Pradesh beat Bengal to a first title.

The age-group ladder

Beneath the senior nationals the BCCI runs a full set of women's age-group tournaments — under-15, under-19 and under-23 national competitions, in one-day and T20 formats at the levels where each is appropriate. This is a genuine change of era. The WCAI ran junior nationals when it could; the current ladder is annual, funded and scouted.

The under-19 tier has acquired particular weight since the ICC created a Women's Under-19 T20 World Cup, which India won at the first attempt in 2023 under Shafali Verma. A strong under-19 nationals season now leads somewhere visible: age-group World Cup, senior nationals, a WPL trial. For girls entering the system, the route runs through district and state age-group selection much as the boys' route does — the general shape of that machinery is described in the guide to Indian cricket academies and the pathway.

The Challenger, the T20 Challenge and the WPL

Above the state game sit the selection tiers. The Senior Women's Challenger Trophy gathers the best performers from the nationals into composite squads and plays them against each other — a short, high-density tournament that selectors treat as a final filter, similar in purpose to the men's Challenger and India A pathway.

Between 2018 and 2022 the BCCI also ran the Women's T20 Challenge, a short exhibition-style event staged alongside the IPL playoffs. It began as a single match between two picked squads and grew to a three-team round robin. It was small, and it was criticised for staying small, but it demonstrated that Indian crowds and broadcasters would watch women's franchise cricket — and that demonstration is part of why the Women's Premier League was launched in 2023 with five franchises and serious auction money.

The WPL changed the economics of the domestic game underneath it. An uncapped domestic player can now earn more from a WPL season than from years of state cricket, which has raised the stakes of the nationals — WPL scouts watch the Senior T20 Trophy closely — and given state associations a reason to invest in women's programmes they once treated as an obligation.

What the domestic game still lacks

An honest account has to include the gaps, and three are structural.

• Volume. A state player gets far fewer competitive days per season than her male counterpart in the Ranji Trophy, and the multi-day tournament — welcome as its revival is — involves only the zonal elite, not the states.
• Depth of pay. Central contracts, equal international match fees and WPL salaries have transformed the top; the median state player's earnings remain modest, and the railway job has not yet been fully replaced as the safety net.
• Red-ball scarcity. With Tests back on India's calendar, players are still learning the long format at international level, because a zonal multi-day tournament of a few matches a season cannot teach it fully.

None of these is unique to India, but India's scale makes them visible: the country produces more talented girl cricketers than the system currently has professional places for.

Following the domestic season

The nationals are streamed rather than televised — the BCCI carries domestic women's matches on its digital platforms, and scorecards live on the board's domestic pages. Attendance is free at most venues. The tournaments to watch, in rough order of selection weight, are the Senior One Day Trophy, the Senior T20 Trophy, the inter-zonals and the Challenger; the WPL, played in its own window, is the shop window for all of them. For the broader context of where all this sits in Indian cricket, start from the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on BCCI domestic season materials for tournament names, entry sizes and formats, historical accounts of the Women's Cricket Association of India for the 1973 founding and the 2006 merger, and ICC materials for the international context. Title counts and entry numbers move season to season and are stated in general terms; the competitive judgements — why Railways dominated, what the WPL changed — are editorial readings of the record rather than computed claims. Where a fact could not be verified against a primary or authoritative source, it has been left out.