Off the Field- The Batter the Better

“When we talk about knowledge or tactical plans, if a woman coach has the capability, then she should surely get an opportunity to coach the Indian men's team.”?– Mithali Raj, former captain of the Indian women’s cricket team, had once said.?

Owing to ‘batters’ like her, what was formerly a gentleman's sport broke out of gender binds and became inclusive, and wholesome. On the field and off of it, gender inclusivity is being?recognized, celebrated and is finding the much-needed systemic push. Today, a machinery of good policies and progressive laws are sustaining women in the workforce and ensuring that gender does not become an impediment to any individual's success.??

Back in 2021, the International Council of Cricket confirmed that it would now be using the term 'batter' instead of 'batsman' for the player on the crease, and interestingly, the term 'batter' had been regularly used in the channel's commentary in the past four years.

A recent decision that furthered the sports fraternity’s commitment towards gender equality was announced at the ICC Annual Conference held in Durban, South Africa, which was to achieve prize money parity by 2030. As ICC Chair Greg Barclay put it, this is ‘a significant moment in the history of our sport’. From 2017, ICC has been increasing prize money at women’s events each year.

As I see it, these are terrific signs especially for cricket, whose audience is gender-neutral and supremely vast in a country like India. In neighbourhoods, across India, the sport is enjoyed by both girls and boys, and even the smallest significant moments from international cricket are reminisced as personal memories by the people of this nation. The love for the sport crosses barriers of gender and the opportunities within the sport must mirror that inclusivity. Former Australia star Lisa Sthalekar had once said that the term 'batter' is a simple yet great move for a sport that ‘genuinely belonged to everyone’.

Even off the field, the ambition and energy of women is not going unnoticed. Take the example of?women-led Self Help Groups (SHGs), which?are the fulcrum of rural development and transformation. We at GDi, realise that women are at the helm of a slow and steady economic revolution that is taking place away from fancy offices in metropolitans, in the humblest and the farthest corners of this nation.

We are working hands in hand with various ecosystem players in aligning forces on ground to digitise and systematise the linking of SHGs to the formal credit economy. Today, financial transactions of Rs 2 Trillion per year take place across the ecosystem (from SHG to national level). According to the 2017 NABARD Annual Report, 45 per cent of the SHGs in the country haven’t been able to get access to credit linkage even once. Today, their needs are varied both in skill requirements as well as instruction models, and formalisation fails to address their diversity.

SHGs being autonomous, community-based bodies, their structure can facilitate the much-required space for rehabilitation of women with varying levels of learning and survivors of gender-based violence. With new and emboldened SHG structures, we can turn the SHG machinery into an ecosystem of absorption, of transformation, of prosperity of not just women but the internal economy.

Today, we are working towards consolidating data of these SHGs. Profiles of Community Based Organisations (CBOs) and their members, which comes close to 100 mn rural households that can be consolidated into 10 mn SHGs, are being synced into one system. Women are at the core of this social and economic revolution and our data-backed interventions are aiding the process of financial inclusion and livelihood creation in India.

SHGs are essentially homogeneous groups of ‘micro-entrepreneurs’ who have typically sustained themselves by contributing a part of their earnings into a common fund which funds their productive and emergent credit needs. Neither had the challenges in seeking these loans been systematically synced nor was the data around the type of credit requirements fully known. India is now attempting to bring these women into a formal credit structure and give them a real shot at prosperity.

Like cricket, even economic and social progress belongs to everybody. If we are opening our eyes today to the fact that women who play sport are no less than their male counterparts, we are also parallelly acknowledging the very real role that women play in the economy.

She is a batter and this century belongs as much to her!