Mumbai now pays its men and women the same retainer, and the BCCI’s own gap is tenfold
The MCA is the first state association in India to hand annual contracts to both its men’s and women’s players at identical rates, which is one thing the BCCI has never managed.
Aug 30, 2026
Twelve lakh rupees a year is not life-changing money for a cricketer. What makes the Mumbai Cricket Association’s new contract list worth reading is that the figure appears twice, once against a men’s name and once against a women’s, and it is the same figure both times.
The MCA has become the first state governing body in India to hand annual retainers to its men’s and women’s players, and to set them at identical rates. Nobody at BCCI level has managed that yet.
What the list actually says
Twenty-two players are on it, 14 men and eight women. Grade A pays 12 lakh for the year, Grade B pays 8 lakh and Grade C pays 6 lakh, and those three numbers apply to everyone regardless of which team they play for. Match fees, daily allowances and performance incentives sit on top.
The contracts are pointed at a specific group: players who are not centrally contracted by the BCCI. This is money for the tier below the tier that already gets paid, which is where the financial cliff in Indian cricket has always been.
Among the men, batter Siddhesh Lad and spin-bowling allrounder Shams Mulani take the top bracket. Seamer Mohit Avasthi and the wicketkeepers Akash Anand and Hardik Tamore are in Grade B, with allrounders Sairaj Patil and Himanshu Singh among those in Grade C. On the women’s side, Humaira Kazi and Vrushali Bhagat are the two Grade A players, Sanika Chalke is alone in Grade B, and ambidextrous bowler Fatima Jaffer is one of five in Grade C.
What it exposes higher up
India equalised international match fees in 2022. A woman playing a Test earns 15 lakh, the same as a man, and the ODI and T20I rates match too. That was genuinely a landmark, and it is also where the equalising stopped.
The annual retainers never followed. A man in the BCCI’s Grade A collects 5 crore a year. A woman in Grade A collects 50 lakh. Harmanpreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana, captains and World Cup winners, are on a tenth of what their male equivalents earn before a ball is bowled. Match fees are the visible number and retainers are the one that actually sets a career’s income, and only the visible one got fixed.
So a state association with a fraction of the BCCI’s money has now done the harder half of the job, in a lower division, for players most fans could not name. It is a small budget making a point that a very large one has been avoiding.
Seven years since somebody promised this
Sourav Ganguly named pay parity as one of his priorities when he took over as BCCI president. That was nearly seven years ago. He has been out of office for a while, the retainers are still where he found them, and the first Indian board to close the gap turned out to be a state association rather than the one he ran.
There is a defence available, and it is the one the BCCI would make: the men’s game generates the revenue, and retainers are supposed to reflect that. It is not a stupid argument. It is just an argument the MCA has now declined to make, at a level where the revenue asymmetry is far starker than it is internationally, where the crowds and the broadcast money are thin for both Mumbai sides.
The rest of the meeting
The MCA also set up a scholarship fund in Ajinkya Rahane’s name, marking the retirement he announced on 30 July after 85 Tests, with a contribution from former president Sharad Pawar. It will go to grassroots cricketers.
This is not the association’s first move of the kind. In 2024-25 it gave the senior men’s team a 100 percent pay raise, which doubled what a player took home across a domestic season overnight. The broader push to make domestic cricket pay has been building since the BCCI started offering its contracted men up to 300 percent more in match fees for turning up to Tests.
Whether other states follow is the question. Mumbai has 42 Ranji Trophies and the deepest talent pool in the country, so it is the association best placed to absorb the cost, which is either a reason to discount the move or the reason it had to come from them first.