NEW DELHI: In a landmark decision, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) on Thursday announced equal match fee for both female and male centrally-contracted players in a bid to promote gender equality in the country’s most popular sport.
“We are implementing pay equity policy for our contracted BCCI women cricketers,” BCCI general secretary Jay Shah wrote on Twitter. BCCI President Roger Binny said the decision is a significant step forward for women’s cricket and the game overall.

A look at the new salary structure …
* According to the newly-introduced system, the Indian women’s cricketers will now receive Rs 15 lakh per Test, Rs 6 lakh per ODI, and Rs 3 lakh per T20I, the same as their male counterparts.
* Earlier, the women players received Rs 1 lakh each for ODIs and T20Is while the match fee for a Test match was Rs 4 lakh.
* This means that the players will see a 275% hike in Test fee, 200% hike in T20 fee and a whopping 500% hike in ODI fee.

* India is now just the second country in world cricket after New Zealand to introduce pay parity for its male and female contracted cricketers.
* The BCCI did not clarify whether there would be changes to the contract system for women.

* Under their current annual contracts, women cricketers in the highest bracket earn Rs 50 lakh (Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana and Poonam Yadav), while Grade B and Grade C players get Rs 30 lakh and Rs 10 lakh respectively.
* On the other hand, men in the Grade A+ bracket (Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Jasprit Bumrah) are paid Rs 7 crore. Those in Grades A, B and C get Rs 5 crore, Rs 3 crore and Rs 1 crore respectively.
* This means that the lowest graded male cricketers still earn twice as much as top-tier women cricketers.

* The contract structure is over and above the match fee that the players earn for the number of matches they play. Moreover, since male cricketers play more international matches compared to their female counterparts, they will obviously make more money from the match fee as well.

* India’s women’s team is ranked fourth in both the ODI and T20I rankings and beat Sri Lanka in the final of the Asia Cup this month to claim a seventh title.
(With inputs from agencies)