Harmandeep, a quality all-rounder, delivers food for a mess and earns three meals in return. He spends most of the rest of his time practising cricket.
Hussain is a teenage fast bowler who already bowls at 125-130 kph. After 4:30 pm, he sets up a stall selling bhunja, a popular street snack. Whenever he is on the ground, he just bowls and bowls.
Priya’s father does not approve of her playing cricket. Her mother took up sewing in addition to being a homemaker so she could fund her daughter’s daily travel to the academy, which is 10 kilometres from their home.
Vikas lives in a single-room, one-bathroom chawl with 17 other joint-family members, including a father who physically assaults him. Food is always scarce at the end of the month, so Vikas often survives on rotis and bananas or chillis. He stole and sold some auto parts to buy his first bat and did just enough to catch the eye of a famous coach.
You did not know these people until now because they are not real. The names are made up to safeguard their identities. Their stories, however, are factual.
Some names may be familiar. Kranti Gaud’s mother sold her jewellery to buy her a cricket kit. Sakib Hussain’s mother sold her jewellery so he could finally own a pair of spikes and stop playing in slippers. Mukul Choudhary’s father sold his house to fund his cricket career. Yashasvi Jaiswal sold pani puri to make ends meet after leaving his Uttar Pradesh home to live in Mumbai. Tilak Varma played with a broken bat for weeks until his coach chipped in because he could not afford a replacement.
Every IPL and WPL auction brings with it a few such rags-to-riches stories. Local and national media make their base outside the homes of these protagonists, celebrating their hardships and praising Indian cricket for providing opportunity and maintaining a degree of democracy. That is, until payday comes for an even poorer cricketer, emerging from even worse circumstances.
In a recent interview, Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) secretary Devajit Saikia was asked about cricket being an expensive sport and why most of the current crop of international stars in India come from humble backgrounds.
“He comes from a humble background and is at the highest level of cricket, driving the most posh vehicles; how is this possible?” Saikia retorted. “Having a posh apartment in prime areas in the metropolises. How is it possible? … There is a concrete support system, and I’ll not disclose any further. Whoever has talent, whoever has merit, a lot of people are supporting. I haven’t heard a single complaint that a boy can’t play because he doesn’t have boots, a bat, or pads. All the associations and clubs are doing a good job. The BCCI is very benevolent, very liberally supporting all the state associations, and the associations are in turn helping the districts, who are helping the clubs. If there’s a good or amazing cricketer, there is no hurdle in his pathway.”
The ground reality, as News18 discovered after conversations with several coaches, cricketers, cricket parents, academics and those working around the sport, is different. A support system does exist for those who cannot afford cricket, but its lines are blurrier than concrete, and few go through the BCCI’s benevolence.
The Cost of Playing Cricket
A youngster aiming to become a professional batter needs at least a couple of bats, a few pairs of gloves, batting pads, a helmet, spikes, other protective guards and a kit bag to keep it all in. For a cricketer playing most days of the week, each bat can last up to a year, while pads, gear such as the abdomen guard, spikes and helmets can last for a few seasons. Gloves last for a year if worn rotationally and can be pushed for two if meticulously taken care of.
Cricketers also require additional investment in their bodies, including protein-rich nutrition and strength and conditioning work. Add the actual cricket practice expenses, tournament fees and travel, and the conservative cost of pursuing the sport professionally comes to around ₹3,00,000 annually, or about ₹25,000 a month.
In 2022, a ‘State of Inequality in India’ report released by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister said that a citizen earning a monthly income of ₹25,000 was in the top 10% of earners in India. This means a family of two working people that can afford one child’s pursuit of cricket professionally, after likely cutting down on several basic expenses, would belong to the most privileged 10% of the country.
That does not scream democratic, does it?
Cricket’s Support System
“Cricket bahut mahanga khel hai, bahut mahanga khel,” Ashif Haque, a coach at the Sonnett club in Ranchi who played a pivotal role in the rise of the first Adivasi cricketer in the IPL, Robin Minz, tells News18.
About 200 children play at Haque’s academy. Twenty of them study in free-of-cost government schools, so Haque takes care of some of their expenses.
“How will a child pay the academy fee when his family cannot even afford his school fees?” he asks. “For such children, admission, match travel and tournament entry are free. We try to provide everything.”
In Lucknow, entrepreneur Saroj Yadhuvanshi runs a scholarship programme. They visit villages and small towns in Uttar Pradesh to invite children to give trials, after a registration fee of around ₹1,500, and, following what they describe as a rigorous and fair selection process, provide a one-year scholarship, including gear, accommodation and food, to five hopefuls.
“If a farmer has small land and no other source of income besides farming, how much can he give to a child?” Yadhuvanshi says. “If the child comes to a city like Lucknow and stays in a hostel and trains properly, the annual expense is easily ₹1–1.5 lakhs. A farmer’s entire year’s income may not even be that much.”
In Jaipur, coach Surendra Rathore, who has coached Kamlesh Nagarkoti and several other Rajasthan-level players, keeps his tutelage free for 20% of his cohort.
“For a child from an average family, it has become very difficult to purchase cricket equipment,” he says. “If he can’t even buy the equipment, how will he showcase his talent?”
Rathore says this has a direct effect on children’s confidence and progress.
“You see, a less talented player with a very good bat can hit sixes and fours with just a little power,” he says. “A very talented child, if he can’t compare with his teammates because of his kit, will be emotionally and mentally disturbed, and that will definitely affect his game.”
Badruddin Siddiqui, the coach of Mohammed Shami and Mohsin Khan, also says the costs beyond academy fees deter parents of talented cricketers the most.
“For parents, it is a huge struggle,” Siddiqui asserts. “They get told that their kid has a lot of talent and, like everyone, they naturally want them to do well. They try everything, try so hard, but if it stretches on for a few years, they break. And a child needs at least two or three years of continuous cricket to develop.”
This is not a unanimous view. Some coaches who spoke to the website say, like Saikia, that they have never seen a talented player left behind because they could not afford to play. They insist that once coaches spot talent, they do everything in their power to help, from using their contacts to arrange gear to bearing some of the expenses themselves.
“An IAS aspirant from Bihar studies under a lamp on the road, and still becomes an officer,” Sukhwinder Bawa, a former cricketer, coach and father of Mumbai Indians all-rounder Raj Angad, says. “Business requires capital. Cricket is the biggest industry, and it is highly paid; to reach there, you have to invest something. If a talented player comes through, we find some or the other arrangement to make sure they have every piece of equipment they need.”
Mohul Bhowmick, a cricketer in Hyderabad who also works part-time, has a different opinion when apprised of this. “There are lakhs of kids from poor backgrounds trying to make it; how many could a few coaches help?” he says.
Moreover, if, as Siddiqui believes, it requires a few years for children to showcase their true skill, then even if money cannot buy talent and hard work, it at least permits them the time to develop.
“Two or three families who sacrifice a lot see their kids get the chance early and make it count,” Siddiqui says. “But there are so many more whose kids don’t even get that opportunity. Their parents make the initial investment, but after a point, they have to choose between cricket and studies because they can only afford one. They think that a good education has a higher odds of success and choose that.”
What the BCCI has done well is distribute its cricket earnings to national tournaments. Match fees in the Ranji Trophy alone could range from ₹40,000 to ₹60,000 per day, which means cricketers of decent stature can earn upwards of ₹15-20 lakhs per year by working hard enough to get selected in multiple tournaments.
Earnings begin as early as Under-16 cricket, where match fees are about half those of senior players. Some coaches rightly point out that there are not many professions where 16-year-olds earn this much and get fame for good measure.
That also attracts families because while most of the fame and prestige is in playing for India and the IPL, reaching a level or two below that is enough to build a life.
But those who earn are exceptions, dwarfed by the sheer number of aspirants. Rathore explains that even if one student from all cricket academies in Jaipur, one of the 41 districts in Rajasthan, were to make it to the state level, there would need to be 200 vacant spots, which do not exist.
“Suppose a child starts playing cricket at eight or nine, and his first board tournament is Under-16,” Rathore adds. “He’ll get three or four matches — even if you calculate ₹40,000 per match, that makes about ₹2 lakhs for four matches. But his yearly fees, equipment, diet, training, it all costs two lakh rupees a year. Where is the earning? There is no return on investment. If he spends ₹1.5-2 lakhs yearly from age eight to fifteen, that’s ₹14-15 lakhs spent just to reach that level.”
In either case, in urban India, it is these coaches and their connections to rich philanthropists that form the cricket support system. The state boards are hardly involved in it.
Some coaches are also driven by the recognition and the possibility of getting more enrolments if one of their pupils reaches the IPL. But with a bit more backing, several are willing to forego their profits.
“Not just me, many people are doing this,” Rathore says of helping cricketers. “But we can only do so much; we also have no backup. We haven’t received any government aid. If we had a scheme where the government allotted us land so we didn’t have to pay rent for the academy, we could make many more children’s costs free. Many things could be done to lower the cost, but we need that authorised support.”
Cricket’s Growing Demand
Some reasons why cricket is so expensive, and thus elitist, are conspicuous in its popularity. It is India’s favourite sport to watch, and for many, it is a genuine gamble because even if the floor might not be great, the ceiling of success is gigantic.
Yadhuvanshi says demand is on such a rise that his scholarship in Lucknow is receiving applicants from beyond Uttar Pradesh, from Assam, West Bengal and even Nepal.
Rathore, on the other hand, blames parents’ over-enthusiasm in pushing their children into cricket.
He argues that not many parents want to accept it as just recreation. Even children who are indifferent about it, or have physiques that do not match the sport’s needs, are pushed into seeing it as a career path, which inflates the prices.
“And the cricket businessmen don’t focus on the local kids; their biggest business comes from the middle class and local cricket,” Siddiqui adds. “They give free equipment to the top-level players, who don’t even need it because they get paid to use the brand. So then they have to recover their money from the children. It’s a difficult cycle to break.”
Several interviewees also mentioned how the prices of bats and gear have skyrocketed in recent months.
Varun Kumar of Apex Cricket (JS Enterprises) in Meerut, who has been in the manufacturing and wholesale business of cricket equipment for years, has an AI-designed warning written over his business’ poster: ‘From today onwards, the rates of all cricket goods have been increased by 35% because raw material has gotten more expensive’.
He tells News18 that this relates to a rise in import costs for petroleum-based raw materials such as nylon and synthetic leather, which are used for gloves, pads and other safety equipment. That, in turn, stems from the ongoing war in West Asia.
But its impact is relatively small. The lion’s share of exorbitant costs goes into retailers’ margins.
Kumar explains that making a pair of gloves costs them ₹700 in raw material, ₹350 in labour charges and ₹150 in electricity and rent expenses, on which they take a ₹100-200 profit.
“We manufacture products for shops and academies under their own names,” he says. “They take the same glove that cost them ₹1,400 from us, put an MRP of ₹3,000, ₹4,000, even ₹6,000 on it, then offer a 25% discount, so the customer happily pays ₹2,500–3,000. If I sold that same glove directly to a customer, my genuine price would be ₹1,600. Even big academies sell those products at a high price to their students. The demand is there, and retailers know that if a customer arrives in a big car, they will pay.”
As for bats, costs have been rising worldwide because of a severe crunch in English and Kashmir willows, which is being described as a ‘bat emergency’.
English willow comes from specialised trees in England that take 20 years to be ready, even as their farmers face pressure from housing companies and others. T20 cricket also requires lighter bats, which are brittle and break down easily.
Yet it is professionals playing at the highest level who hoard the best wood, simply because they can.
Climate change is making the situation more difficult by the day, which also affects Kashmir Willow production. The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) has had to amend the Laws of Cricket to permit laminated bats, made as a combination of different types of wood, in open-age recreational cricket to alleviate some pressure on high-quality willow.
The ICC has not yet woken up to the irony, but it has a sponsorship agreement that involves ‘donating’ ten cricket kits to grassroots levels for every 100 runs scored in an ICC tournament. Until a long-term solution is found, the most basic cricket need, equipment, will continue to offer an undue advantage to those who can afford it.
Cricket’s Exclusion
The issue extends beyond class. In India’s context, it is almost impossible to untangle class from caste and religion.
Minz is the only Adivasi cricketer to have ever played in the IPL, taking Adivasi representation in the league to around 0.12% when they make up to 9% of India’s population. There have been claims of some cricketers belonging to the Dalit community playing for the Indian men’s team, but none accept it as their identity publicly, and even the reported ones make up a fraction of the total.
There has been negligible research on this under-representation. However, it has been academically ascertained that India’s caste system is a major driver of economic disparity between different population groups.
According to the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021, five out of six multidimensionally poor people in India live in households whose head is from a Scheduled Tribe (ST), a Scheduled Caste (SC) or Other Backward Class (OBC).
India has one of the highest populations of child labourers. The United Nations in 2022 found that most belong to marginalised communities. Global research has found that a significant portion of child labourers do not attend school, the first place where they can be exposed to cricket or other sports.
Sports are known to uplift people from such social barriers around the world, but cricket is rarely the choice for rural India, where most of the population still resides.
For example, in 2009, Sanjay Pathak, a geography teacher in a government school in Bihar, took it upon himself to teach athletics to the girls in his school.
Clearing ancestral land to establish a club, he faced brickbats from colleagues who did not consider sports a career, trespassing from village boys, caste barriers and patriarchy to polish dozens of talents who are now playing at the national level.
“Children play cricket everywhere—gully cricket, mohalla cricket, on the roads—but organised cricket is expensive,” Pathak says now. “You need a ground, proper pitch, equipment, bats, pads, and academy fees. Many children cannot afford these things. In comparison, athletics, football, and other sports require less time—one or one-and-a-half hours, a fixed routine, and a ball that costs ₹1,000.”
Pathak says government schools allot about 45 minutes daily for Physical Education, which can be used for athletics but is nowhere near enough to train for cricket.
“The sports curriculum should be made compulsory, and special hours should be fixed for children who are serious about sports,” he says. “We have Eklavya centres in Bihar for Olympic sports—children live, eat, and train in the same school. For cricket, unless the government creates a similar structure, the real talent, which comes from our villages, won’t emerge and large-scale progress is impossible.”
Dr. Biju Philip, an academic and lecturer at La Trobe University, Australia, has spent years studying how sport can be used as a vehicle for social inclusion in rural India, working with multiple tribal communities. His choice of sport was also football.
“A few years ago, someone asked me, ‘Why not cricket?’ I said clearly that cricket is mostly for the rich,” he remembers. “An ordinary person has to buy a bat, pad, top, shorts, and boots. How do they afford that? For these communities, football was already a stretch. Cricket would be out of the question.”
There are more reasons for India’s marginalised castes and communities to remain so far from cricket, including active discrimination, which needs to be studied, but the sheer expense of playing has been damaging enough.
All countries, including England and Australia, are still grappling with making the sport more inclusive among their downtrodden masses. A comparable case for India could be found in South Africa, which carries similar scars of colonisation and inequality.
Historical estimates suggest that the white population of South Africa, making up roughly 7% to 8% of the population, owns a disproportionate 70% share of the country’s wealth. It is one of the reasons why cricket in South Africa was for years dominated by white men.
Dr. Mary Ann Dove, a researcher with a PhD in Sport and Exercise Science from the University of Cape Town, has worked extensively to understand the socio-ecological factors in cricketers’ talent development in South Africa.
“The fundamental issue my research found was that access to opportunities and competition is probably the most central aspect in talent development,” she says.
The first part of ‘access’ is education. Children who attend better-resourced schools with cricket facilities have an advantage.
In India, about half of school students study in government schools, and most belong to rural regions and marginalised communities.
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, a citizen-led survey, found that around 34% of primary schools and 28% of upper primary or higher-level schools in rural India did not have a playground. About 80% of schools had sports equipment available, but less than 5% of primary schools had a separate Physical Education teacher.
Although not an audit of government schools per se, it paints a grim picture.
Financial heft impacts almost every aspect of cricket. Most of the Black Africans to have played for South Africa in men’s and women’s cricket have been bowlers, while Asians tend to be spinners. Batting has been almost exclusively reserved for white players.
Coaches in India have also observed that those from financially weaker families tend to lean towards bowling over batting. Siddiqui says his students from rural areas choose bowling because it only requires them to invest in shoes, and not the specialised batting gear.
“It’s not just in South Africa; look at why so many talented poor people adopt football,” Rathore points out. “You buy one pair of studs, it lasts many days, and you play with just one ball. Wherever equipment becomes expensive for the talented and hardworking, that game moves further away. The best example: does everyone play golf? Does everyone play polo? To play polo, you need the capacity to keep a horse, space to keep it, and caretakers. The common public cannot play these games. But cricket — cricket humaare yahaan pe toh religion hai, cricket toh India mein puja jaata hai.”
In South Africa, Dr. Dove’s research says this relates to cricket centres being farther from poorer neighbourhoods, while parents with long working hours and little savings struggle to find time to drop off and pick up their children from academies, forcing them to sleep less. India is no different, and examples of parents taking early retirements to commit to their child’s cricket are quite common.
In another example, Dr. Dove’s research found that family responsibilities do not allow some cricketers the choice to play cricket freely. In India, Yashasvi was not the only Jaiswal who left Uttar Pradesh for Mumbai in 2012. His brother, Tejasvi, also did, but shifted to Delhi in just over a year to work as a salesman because their family back home was struggling financially.
Tejasvi only resumed his career after Yashasvi had made it.
A separate study for Cricket South Africa (CSA) found a ‘casual link’ between poor upbringing and diminished visual-motor skills, which are paramount for batting. While more investment is required in the matter, academics speculate that it could relate to exposure to better nutrition and something as simple as better toys at an early age.
“Diet is very important for any athlete,” Yadhuvanshi says, with observations from his scholarship. “A kid from a good family can maintain his diet—he gets the required calories throughout the day, and he manages his post-workout nutrition. But a kid from a village cannot do that, for he doesn’t have easy access to fruits, dry fruits, and the nutrients he needs. Because of this, they suffer more injuries and cramps while playing.”
Then there are role models. If no one playing a sport looks like you or comes from a similar background, it is hard to believe that you can do it.
“I sometimes call it a soup of factors,” Dr. Dove says. “We found that people want a role model who looks like them and plays the same discipline.”
Haque adds that Minz’s rise to the IPL has caused a wave of cricket interest in the Adivasi community of Ranchi, but an aspiring Dalit cricketer elsewhere will still need to squint to find an idol.
Affirmative action in South Africa, namely quotas from age-group cricket to the international level, where some spots are reserved for Black and Brown South Africans, was partially aimed at solving this problem.
It has sometimes been proposed as a solution to India’s cricket inequality, too. There are positive examples of it working. A report in The Wire in 2018 noted that India’s women’s cricket team had been more representative of marginalised communities than the men’s team.
Women’s cricket is mainly supported by the Railways department of the Indian government, which, unlike private corporates, hires across qualification levels and offers reservations.
But Dr. Dove and other researchers have regularly found that although quotas can be helpful at the age-group level to create equal opportunities and undo some historical wrongs, their application needs to be more nuanced.
“Quotas don’t necessarily develop players holistically; they don’t change family lives, financial situations, or the mindset of coaches who don’t like being forced in picking specific players,” Dr. Dove says. “Psychologically, the vast majority of players don’t want to be a quota pick. They don’t want to think they’re in the team because of their skin colour—or, in your case, their caste. They want to be there on merit, but they want to be allowed to prove themselves alongside proper development: coaching, facilities, nutrition, access to medical care when injured.”
Cricket’s Optimism
Some who have been there are adamant that bank accounts are only a small obstruction in the grand scheme of things. Irfan Sait of Bengaluru, one of the most renowned coaches in the country, says his years of experience have convinced him that “the number of hours will outweigh the number of rupees you spend”.
“Haven’t we seen so many come from very ordinary financial backgrounds and go on to become better?” he asks. “I think their level of focus, their desire, and the fire that burns in the belly to become something is stronger than what money can buy.”
Manzoor Pandav, the former Punjab Kings player who worked as a part-time night watchman when he was building his cricket career in Kashmir, adds that “Anything is possible if you work hard and honestly”, and that “God also helps the hard workers”.
One common comment from the optimists is that playing even some cricket is good enough to build a career around it. Sait points out how coaches, journalists and officials can earn more than a decent living, while Pandav says there are exponentially more opportunities to play and earn from cricket in the valley, which he and a few hundred others are using.
“Cricket has grown a lot now,” Waseem Mirza, an Aligarh-based cricketer who plays in the UP T20 league, says in agreement. “There is so much exposure, and so many leagues have started. Even at the smaller levels, there is decent money. You may not earn a huge amount, but you can earn enough to spend your life well.”
But only a few kilometres of difference matter. In the middle of Pandav and Mirza’s states, in Uttarakhand, no IPL or Indian cricketer comes through until they migrate out in their development years, as Rishabh Pant did.
Locals say facilities such as grounds, coaches and private leagues are just not at a comparable level to traditional centres, though that does not stop them from trying in the hope of being the exceptions.
“If you don’t reach the state level, your options for earning money are coaching, umpiring for corporate leagues, or becoming a scorer, but even those professions pay more in bigger cities,” Ashwini Maurya, a cricketer in Haridwar, says.
It all circles around to ‘merit’. While celebrating every success story, we make ourselves believe that sport is inherently meritorious, that if you are good, you will be successful. The right yardstick, instead, is opportunity.
Look at Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli. They are often cited as examples of merit. People remember their famous 1988 Harris Shield semi-final partnership and say both were equally talented and were almost at the same point in their lives, but one ended up becoming the greatest of all time and the other, labelled an alcoholic, is still struggling.
But being at the same place at one point in life does not mean that both had the same start. While Tendulkar was born to a poet-professor father and a government employee mother, Kambli’s story is hidden in the fifth paragraph of this article, in Vikas’ name, beginning with an abusive father, a mechanic and a loving mother who died when he was 20.
While he and Tendulkar were both equally supported by Ramakant Archrekar, Kambli used to travel from and back to a confrontational room of 17 others. Dr. Dove’s research found that parents’ emotional support was crucial for talented cricketers, and only one of Tendulkar and Kambli had that, despite their arguably similar skill sets.
So the question remains: even if BCCI selectors and IPL owners do not look at anything but performance, have all the players in the pool of selection had the same opportunity?
The poorer you are, the more likely you are to grow up in a dysfunctional home, to either not study at all or study in a government school without a PT teacher, to live in a village with no cricket facilities, to not have the right diet to avoid injuries in the future, and to be unable to show your talent to a coach who can teach you and might help you with expensive gear.
There is nothing in a name, just like age is just a number in sports. But your name depends on where you come from — your state, district, village and caste — and so does the time you have to become a cricketer in India.
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