Women In Sports: The Seven Sisters Are Not To Be Subdued

A few years ago, when seven-year-old Monika Das, from a small village in Lakhimpur district of Assam, started playing cricket with the boys, mostly her brothers and cousins, she raised quite a few eyebrows.

While some would comment on her dress, many approached her mother, Bimalprabha Hazarika Das, requesting her to discourage her daughter from playing. Her mother, a high school pass out, did the opposite. She was aware that her family was struggling financially and she would have to let go of her dream of seeing her daughter become a doctor. So, she allowed her to do what she was good at—play cricket. Today, she is a proud mother. Das, now 31, represents the Assam Women’s Cricket Team.

“My mother is not educated but she took a wise decision. We were aware that supporting my family financially by taking up sports was too far-fetched, but I continued playing,” says Das.

Fortunately, she got an opportunity to play many matches at the village level. In most matches, she would be the only girl in the team. In 2006, she started playing at the district level and 13 years later, in 2019, she earned her place in the T-20 women’s cricket team.

One comes across numerous such stories in the region. For women wanting to be in sports, their journeys, as compared to those of men, are often full of struggles and the road to success is more than a little bumpy.

Take the case of Dangmei Grace, an international footballer from Bishnupur Dimdailong, a sleepy village along the Myanmar border in the Churachandpur district in Manipur. She was the first girl from her village to play football but she did not have to deal with snide comments. According to her, what worked in her favour was her “boy-like persona and her short hair”.

“Because of the way I looked, I was almost unrecognisable as a girl. I made the most of it and would roam around freely, unlike the other girls in my village. When a school friend asked me if I would like to take part in a grassroots-level tournament, I said yes and that’s how it began,” Grace, 26, tells Outlook.

She plays for the India women’s national football team and is one of the few footballers from the country to have signed an overseas contract. She plays as a forward in the Uzbekistan Women’s League.

It is not incidental that Das and Grace are from the Northeast which has consistently produced some of the finest sportswomen. Yet, there are multiple issues stopping them from realising their full potential. The major issue is that of perception—convincing people that women can excel at ‘male dominated’ sports—an issue that is morale-crushing.

“Cricket and football are still regarded as men’s sports. People often don’t take us seriously. Look at the number of matches women cricketers get to play in a year as compared to the men,” says Das.

The lack of basic infrastructure and the unavailability of women-friendly coaching and training centres are issues that need immediate attention.

To elaborate on the infrastructural woes, the example of Manipur needs to be mentioned. The state has produced some of the finest women footballers like Bala Devi, Oinam Bembem Devi and Martina Thokchom, to name a few. In fact, in 2022, seven footballers from Manipur were in the Indian squad in the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup. The state capital, Imphal, is home to India’s first sports university—the National Sports University, inaugurated in 2018. Yet sportswomen in Manipur are not a happy lot.

According to a recent survey, ‘Breaking Barriers for Women in Sports’ by Simply Sports, a policy research body, 48 percent of female athletes from Manipur reported travelling an average of 10 km to reach the nearest sports facility. 28 percent of athletes from the state reported the lack of sports resources in terms of infrastructure. Access to basic facilities like clean toilets, drinking water and good lighting arrangements in stadia, especially in the evenings, have also been pointed out as hindrances. Disparity in prize money and salaries are other reasons why more and more sportswomen are vanishing from the fields. Talking to Outlook, Siddhartha Sankar Deka, co-owner of the Guwahati City Football Club, says: “There is a vast difference between the remunerations for women football players and those of men. A male footballer representing a club in a recognised tournament like the Guwahati Super Division gets a minimum Rs 30-40,000 for the two- month-long league. A woman footballer, on the other hand, manages to get only Rs 5-10,000 for a tournament.”

Like Manipur, in Mizoram, too, taking up sports is encouraged from a young age. However, here too, women are unhappy. Talking to Outlook, Tetea Hmar, the Honorary Secretary of the Mizoram Football Association, regarded as the Father of Mizo football, says: “Women don’t get a level-playing field. Once a footballer told me that more tournaments should be organised for women because that’s their only chance to play official tournaments. Also, women get the stadium to themselves for practice only when there is a tournament coming up,” says Hmar. He feels the various sports associations have a huge role to play. They must ensure more and more women take up sports and continue playing.  Amid so many woes, boxing offers a glimmer of hope.

According to Lovlina Borgohain, 25, Tokyo Olympics bronze medallist boxer, from Baromukhia village in Assam’s Golaghat district, boxing is one sport where there is less disparity in terms of salary and prize money. Borgohain, the third Indian boxer to win a medal at the Olympics, after Vijender Singh and MC Mary Kom, feels that in Assam, issues like poor infrastructure and pay disparity were addressed after she clinched the medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. “Unlike football and cricket, female boxers are getting equal remuneration. The infrastructure is fine too. More and more girls are now taking up boxing. The Assam government’s recent announcement of providing government jobs to those who win a medal at the national level is also inspiring the girls,” Borgohain tells Outlook.

However, Borgohain, who has been boxing since 2012, admits that it’s only recently that these changes have been introduced.

“For girls, the situation has improved after I won a medal at the Olympics. Earlier, people used to believe that there is no career in sports, The prize money was also little. But in the past two years, the remuneration has become almost equal. However, we still have fewer leagues for women,” Borgohain says. Another area that needs focus is the way women sports players are represented in the media. Referring to a UNESCO report, Gitika Talukdar, an Assam-based international sports journalist, mentioned that although women make up approximately 40 percent of all the athletes, they receive just 4 percent of the total sports coverage. “Clearly, there is a long way to go to rectify gender inequality in sports media coverage. Without proper media coverage, it’s difficult to get mileage in commercial segments. Due to this, there is a lack of sponsors and stakeholders for female sports, which is still blocking the path of growth,” Talukdar said.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Unfair TREATMENT")