2020 was quite the year.
Yes, we’ve survived it, but in the process, we’ve witnessed in almost every realm of life, some of the world’s starkest inequalities rise to the surface. And sport was no different. Perhaps the most evident of contrasts that unabashedly grabbed our attention last year was between men’s and women’s cricket. Long before the pandemic made its way into our worlds, The Sports Law & Policy Centre, Bengaluru (SLPC) along with Snehal Pradhan and Karunya Keshav, have been reflecting, questioning and looking to eventually dismantle inequalities in this realm.
In many ways for us, yes, 2020 was a year of these contrasts, but it was also a year of hope. And hope, we did, through our #EqualHue campaign – a project that met the world in 2020 to question the rigid gender inequalities in Indian cricket, and like most questions of the year, seeking a better world from the next.
Now, we would like you to join us.
But first, an introduction to #EqualHue: Through the Equal Hue Project, we look to offer suggestions on enabling excellence in Indian women’s cricket and setting up players for personal empowerment. The project is intended as a collaborative effort of all stakeholders in women’s cricket. It is a joint collaboration of the SLPC with Karunya Keshav and Snehal Pradhan. It began earlier this year based on a report titled ‘An Equal Hue – The Way Forward for the Women in Blue’ which was co-authored by Sidhanta Patnaik, Snehal and Karunya, and presented at The Sports Law and Policy Symposium. A copy of the report is available here.
Post the Symposium, over the two weeks leading up to the Women’s T20 Challenge that took place in November 2020, we ran the #EqualHue media campaign, where we released a wishlist for women’s cricket on our social media channels and launched the official website for the #EqualHue initiative at equalhue.in. Our list, titled, “10 Reforms Indian Women’s Cricket needs in 2021”, sets out the ten main aims we need to work towards this year, to leave women’s cricket in a better state than when we found it. Crafted as a series of aspirations with the sky as our limit, we now look to make way for this wishlist to become attainable – as a checklist of sorts.
To this end, we seek to involve everyone from the grassroots to those at the BCCI as well as both our national cricket teams. To get to the crux of the issues and collate possible solutions, we will be having closed-door round table discussions over the next few months to engage with stakeholders and analyse the opportunities and challenges ahead. These conversations are intended to culminate in a concise Charter of Reforms, that takes into consideration all the data, opinions and suggestions that we have gathered from stakeholders.
Over the next few months, through the SLPC newsletter, Highlights, we shall bring to you excerpts from the discussions and research we conduct on women’s cricket as well as sharing any interesting developments that we come across and hope you will be able to join the conversation.
For more information about the #EqualHue initiative or how you could get involved, do visit our website. If you would like to reach out to our team to discuss collaborations, do drop a line to Kruthika at kruthika [at] lawnk [dot] com or Shan at shan [at] lawnk [dot] com.
Here’s hoping for a more equal cricketing field in 2021!