Juhi Chawla wants the IPL moved to January, and the BCCI is only looking at starting two weeks earlier
Lalit Modi has backed a January start or an October-April window, but the board’s own plan for 2027 is a 10 March to 15 May season.
Nov 10, 2026
Juhi Chawla thinks the IPL has outgrown its slot in the calendar. The Kolkata Knight Riders co-owner posted on X on Monday that the league should move out of the Indian summer and start in January, and Lalit Modi, the IPL’s first chairman, has been making the same argument with a lot more force.
“Why keep playing the biggest cricket tournament on the planet in the harshest heat?” Chawla wrote. “And if the calendar is being reconsidered, why not January instead of April-May? Better conditions. Better cricket. A better experience for everyone overall.” She also wrote that the IPL “no longer needs to find its place in the cricket calendar. It has earned the right to influence it.”
Modi’s two options
Modi, who founded the league in 2008 and was banned for life by the BCCI for misconduct in 2013, put forward two alternatives: a January start, or what he called “a carefully structured October-April competition calendar”. His main point was about who gets to decide. “The IPL does not need the ICC to give it a window,” he wrote. “The IPL is a domestic tournament owned and operated by the BCCI. The BCCI can decide when to stage it.”
He accepted that international commitments and player releases would still have to be managed, then compared the IPL to the Premier League in football and finished with a line aimed at the ICC and the other boards: “You cannot run tomorrow’s cricket on yesterday’s economics.”
What the BCCI is actually planning
There has been no formal move to take the IPL to January. The BCCI has been looking at something far smaller. In June, the board secretary Devajit Saikia said he had told the board’s games development staff to look at windows that start by 10 March and finish by 15 May, from the 2027 season, because of the heat and the risk of pre-monsoon rain late in May. The 2026 edition started on 28 March and its final was on 31 May. Saikia also said the league would stay at 74 matches.
That is a shift of a couple of weeks. Chawla and Modi are talking about moving the whole tournament by two or three months, and that is a different conversation.
Why January is harder than it sounds
The heat argument is a fair one. Afternoon games in April and May are hard on players and on the crowds, and Saikia said as much himself. But January is not an empty month. The SA20’s 2027 season runs from 17 January to 21 February, and all six of its franchises belong to IPL owners’ groups, Knight Riders not among them. Dew in night games would likely be a bigger factor in a north Indian winter than it is in April.
Saikia also said that even a 10 March start would need the domestic season to finish earlier. A January IPL would mean moving far more than that. Of the two ideas, the October-April one, which spreads the league out rather than lifting it into January, at least leaves room to work round other events. Neither is close to happening.
Nearer at hand, the ten franchises have until 17 November to submit their retention lists for IPL 2027, and the mini-auction is set for 16 December in Goa.