Sixteen-year-old Ira Jadhav walked into an auction room in Mumbai on 2 May this year. She walked out as the most expensive buy. This was not the Women’s Premier League. It was the first-ever auction of the T20 Mumbai Women’s League. Aakash Tigers paid Rs 10 lakh for her. Until then, she was best known as the first Indian to score a triple century in Under-19 cricket.
The auction revealed a lot about where the women’s cricket stands today. A total of 363 players were available at the auction. Franchises spent Rs 1.47 crore and picked 50 players.
Three franchises then played the league’s first season at the Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai, in June. For the first time, Mumbai’s young women had a state franchise league to be picked for.
The model is no longer a theory
It is striking how normal this has become in 2026. Bengal went first. In 2024, the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) announced India’s first women’s franchise T20 league run by a state association. Every player and coach had to be from Bengal. In the second season, the women’s draft picked 128 players from a pool of 188 (8 teams with 16 players each). This June, the third season streamed nationwide on JioHotstar.
Delhi’s women’s league began its third season on 20 August. Four women’s teams are in the fray. The Delhi and District Cricket Association says its women’s structure now has 48 club teams and more than 700 players. Players move from the association’s own women’s league into the Delhi Premier League.
Maharashtra’s women’s league began in June 2025 with four teams. Smriti Mandhana was the icon player of Ratnagiri Jets and scored 152 runs in five matches. Karnataka’s Maharani Trophy began the same year with five franchises. Its second season, in which the edition was downsized to four teams, ran at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru from 22 July to 1 August. Uttarakhand, a smaller association, is in its third season too. This year’s edition has seven men’s teams and four women’s teams, all at one venue in Dehradun.
None of this needed a new system. It needed a decision to treat women’s cricket as part of the league, not an add-on.
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Then there’s Tamil Nadu
The Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL) turned ten this year. MS Dhoni inaugurated the first season on 16 August 2016. The league was launched to fill the gap left by the absence of top T20 cricket in the state and to give local players a platform. And it worked.
T Natarajan, the son of a daily-wage worker, took ten wickets in seven matches for Dindigul Dragons in that first season. Kings XI Punjab bought him the next year for Rs 3 crore. Sunrisers Hyderabad signed him in 2018. He made his India debut in 2020. That is what a state league can do for a player nobody was watching.
The women’s side has not moved at that pace. In November 2025, the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association (TNCA) said it was planning a women’s TNPL in 2026. Its president, TJ Srinivasaraj, said the state had enough talent to run a smaller league. Its secretary admitted that an earlier plan for 2025 had not materialised. He said the association would launch even with just two teams.
Then came July. At the launch of the tenth edition, Srinivasaraj said a franchise-style women’s tournament would come soon. For now, there would be two exhibition matches. After them, the association would take stock of the talent. A franchise event might follow next year, “provided the talent is right, and the quality of cricket can be retained”.
The first exhibition match was played on 25 August in Chennai. The TNCA President’s XI beat the TNCA Secretary’s XI by three wickets in a game that went to the final over. The match was streamed on YouTube. No TV channel had secured the rights to cover the match.
Look at the timeline. A league was planned for 2025. It was promised for 2026. It is now a maybe for 2027. In November, the president said there was enough talent to start. In July, the talent had to be right. The two statements are hard to reconcile.
TNPL itself was a bet on local players in 2016. The women’s game is being asked to prove itself first.
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Not a talent gap — a sequencing problem
Jhulan Goswami described the problem when Bengal launched its league in 2024.
“At most, other states conduct exhibition matches for women”, she told ESPNcricinfo. Apart from the WPL, she said, Bengal’s league was the first professional or franchise-based tournament open to them. Tamil Nadu still fits her description.
Tamil Nadu does not lack talent. G Kamalini of Madurai fetched Rs 1.60 crore from Mumbai Indians at the WPL auction in December 2024. Delhi Capitals pushed the bidding to Rs. 1.50 crore. Kamalini was 16, and her base price was Rs 10 lakh. In 2025, she became the youngest player in WPL history. In December 2025, she made her India debut.
What Tamil Nadu lacks is the base. The TNCA president says the state has about 150 clubs for men and barely any dedicated clubs for women. He hopes a league would encourage more of them to form. Bengal’s women’s club tournament started with 10 clubs in 2024, doubled to 20 in 2025 and has 40 this year. By the president’s own logic, a league would help create the clubs. Waiting for the talent to be “right” first gets the order wrong. The TNCA is treating structural growth as a prerequisite rather than a consequence.
Tamil Nadu does not have to invent anything. Its own association laid out the plan last November: begin with four to six teams, or even two. At 16 players a squad, as in Bengal and Karnataka, a four-team league needs 64 women. The president himself said the state had enough talent for a smaller league.
Delhi and Uttarakhand run their women’s matches alongside the men’s, at the same venue. Bengal shows the base can be built: its women’s club tournament grew from 10 clubs to 40 in two years. The talent has already been priced. Mumbai Indians paid Rs 1.60 crore for Kamalini. The association says it will take stock of the talent after the exhibition matches. The stock has been taken.
What is missing is a date. Announce a four-team women’s TNPL for 2027, play it alongside the men’s edition and stream it on the same channel. After ten years of TNPL, ‘maybe’ is not a plan.
Kapil Gupta is an assistant professor of Decision Sciences and Operations Management at IIM Kozhikode. He teaches Sports Analytics, Data Analysis and Business Statistics. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)